Front-runner: Nikon D500 leads class in studio and dynamic range tests

I'm TOTALLY LOST
When comparing them side by side at say ISO 12800, the D500 looks great but Can someone explain to me why the D500 with the same lens as the D7200 require 2 full stops more light to achieve this result? The shutter speed is 1/1600 vs. the D7200 which is 1/6400. This means in real world shooting where you set your Aperture and shutter, you need to set the ISO 2 stops higher than other cameras for proper exposure. That's CRAP NIKON!!!

What it is the point of such a high ISO? Looking at the test results, the highest ISO's are useless!

But of course the new Pentax will be much better which is why DPR refuses to review them, they make all other cameras—except for the Phases and the Hasselblads—look like scrambled eggs.

I think the main thing with APSC is that even in indoor low light conditions without flash, the best examples will get some great results. @ ISO 3200 /6400 still has decent gradation through the shadows and some recovery of shadows is possible without getting a mosaic of coloured dots as soon as you lean on the adjustment, not possible with D200, D80 era cameras, the D7200 has a huge dynamic range, D500 looks like it will be same and maybe slightly better. In this regard the best Nikon APSC's are well ahead of the mFT's (sorry, I like the cameras). Sure, latest 5D's and D750 will do better but performance of the APSC covers all the bases, not so back in the day good "available" light photography was much improved by FF, now APSC has bridged that gap

yep the 7200 is cheaper but doesn't have the AF, raw buffert, 4K video etc etc etc

If your main thing is landscape, casual street and fine art, the d7200 is simply the better choice. The price is Better by far, the build is absolutely fine, it is lighter, excellent AF, high iso is the roughly the same and it has higher resolution.

Glad I didn't fall for the D500 hype. Download the D7200D/D500 @ 3200 ISO and compare faces at 100%. Even at this moderate ISO there are already fine details, lines and hairs the D500 simply does not pick up. ISO performance is a half stop improvement at best, so downsize your D7200 file to 20MP ... boom... advantage nullified.

The advantages of the D500 are AF fine tune, bluetooth, backlit buttons, and improved FPS/buffer. But if you can't get the shot with a 20 frame buffer, 100 won't help either....the moment will have already passed.

The problem for nikon is that a refurb 7200 is like ~750 bucks shipped, add to that a sigma 150-600 C lens and you are up and running with a high performing, extremely lightweight setup for LESS than the D500...with better IQ to boot.

I'll sum up the nikon buying guide for 2016:

-best DSLR IQ: D750
-best DX IQ: D7200
-best DX ISO: D500 @ the cost of resolution and detail

Nikon put this sensor in a cheaper body and take my damn money!

Personally I think the a6300 is the sharpest in this test. But is this really an unbiased method to compare bodies only? Is the a6300 the best sensor/firmware or is the Zeiss the best lens? Each camera is using a different lens and how do you null out the influence of that?

It is also sharper than rest of them. All Canons (70D,80D,7D2) looks same when compared with D500. Nikon is easily 1/2 stop better than Canons at high ISO. Canon did not make any progress in terms of high ISO between 70d, 80d and 7D2.
I think, Canon is always going to do catch up job with respect to Nikon and Sony with slightly less sensor size.

Im not sure if the d750 owners were having too much expectations with the d500 regarding high iso, after all they are used to see great high iso performance. It seems that the d500 is just slightly worst than d750, maybe 1/2 or 2/3 of a stop difference but thats it... I think the d700 succesor will come next year with a much better 24mp d750 sensor 10 fps in order to compete with this year canon 5dmark 4.... any of these cameras will be wonderful cameras but their are FF so their are another story and maybe another price...and as for the d500, well you just pay 2k dollars and you have great lowlight performance (equal o better than old cameras like d3/d700,5mk2, etc), Top AF system, 10fps,4k video, a relative light camera, wonderful base ISO DR, 1.5 x factor for reach, etc

Im dont know why some people make a big emphasis in comparing oranges with apples.

Nope, not class leading...Marketing words.
Samsung NX1 is still leading APS-C class in IQ...
But very close.

WOW..didn't take long for the haters to come out..sorry haters the nikon d500 is an AWESOME aps-c camera ..so is the canon 7dm2 and will fullfill the needs of its INTENDED audience VERY WELL.the nikon d500/7dmk2 will be on the sidelines at major sporting events like the NFL.MLB etc. etc..as a back up to cameras like the d4/d5 and eos 1d series

Not sure if it's just my naff work monitor, but on the first page on this studio test, the Sony 6300 and the Nikon 7200 both appear to look noticeably better in sharpness and clarity in picture quality, the edges of lines/circles look sharper and neater?

I feel like I've completely missed something here, or the test was just poorly executed, or are we really saying that the D500 is lesser quality than the D7200 and the Sony 6300?

No surprise.
Nikon has for many years beaten Sony using Nikon, Sony or Toshiba sensors.
The D7200, D7100, D5500, D5300 and others were better than the A6000 (which had banding issues too). In fact, several camera makers including Samsung made better performing cameras.
This is just a continuation of that trend.

Of course Nikon makes cameras for Photographers while Sony makes electronic devices for gear heads.

Yes, you can change aperture in LV and video even during recording. The exact crop is to be calculated:

camera sensor width of 5568 pixels is "1,5:1" to FF (more or less, go find the exact size of the chip and recalculate if you please)

then 3840 of those for video in 1:1 aspect (1,45:1 of the D500 chip)
===
2,175:1 crop for lens milimeters
which means that a 50mm lens on D500 in 4K video will give you equivalent FOV of 109 mm lens on FF camera.

7200 is still very impressive, as good as anything out there!

The Sony a6300 looks better at half the price.
https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1542/26649413086_89311db094_o.png

There are only two real competitors to d500. One is canon 7d mk2, the other is samsung nx1. You didn't care to include the latter in your comparison. Pity, since despite being 2 years older, it has 28mp bsi sensor, more fps, lighter body, real 4k downscaled from 6.5k, 120fps in video @1080 and much more.

And...it fares so well that I still prefer it even from your samples:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/image-comparison/fullscreen?attr144_0=nikon_d500&attr144_1=samsung_nx1&attr144_2=sony_a6300&attr144_3=fujifilm_xpro2&attr146_0=100_6&attr146_1=100_6&attr146_2=100_6&attr146_3=200_5&attr177_2=off&attr177_3=off&normalization=compare&widget=345&x=0.07241991365205853&y=0.672699151044089

Now, some ppl will moan that it's discontinued and such usual things one says when he's without real arguments. But you can still buy it,at prices well below d500.

When I compare the D500 with the D750 in the Studio scene, the latter outperforms the D500 at every ISO point in both JPEG and RAW - up to 51200. Beyond 51200 the D500 images are barely useable, but if you need it, I guess the D500 wins. In my mind the D750 is a hands down the winner.

why is it that at very high ISOs the image quality of the D500 looks almost the same (just slightly slightly better) to the a6300 IQ when in RAW mode, wile instead in jpeg the colors and performance of the d500 is ten times better than the a6300?? Even if in raw mode they are similar, they perform much differently in jpeg. Could it just be because of different processing?

matches my experience here. best all-round-camera currently available. this beast does everything. and does it very very well.

and as usual: full stop ISOs show the increase in noise. for best results *ALWAYS* shoot a 1/3 stop below a full stop.

e.g. iso5000 has same noise as iso3200 and is significantly better than iso6400.

this has been a Nikon staple since the D200.

As good as Nikon FX. Cool. I look forward to the next round of FX sensor Nikons that are based on this sensor technology iteration....

The D500 with the F1.8 Sigma zooms is a relatively cheaper and smaller alternative to the D5 with the 24-70 and 70-210 F2.8 zooms. I would definitely think about it for journalism and weddings. (plus the usual birding and wildlife shooting, but that is with a different lens set) I would still keep a D810 handy if I had one. D500 is a DSLR so I would not compare it with mirrorless APS-C cameras: that is a different market in my perception. By the way noise of D500 is on par of D810 on the pixel level, so after downsampling the latter is still better.

This news is welcome.
Esp. in BIF this camera seems to be made for, backlit subjects are very frequent and the ability to push shadows is an important asset for the D500.

The image quality is excellent, but how does it fair against the FF competitors?

If you shoot RAW, the D750 is better regarding noise performance, but not by a lot. The differences are not big, but noticeable.

If you shoot jpeg, its practically the same, which indicates the improvements in raw processing from the camera jpeg engine.

It compares well to the D3, D700 and 5D2 noise profile, but it can't match the newer generations of FF.

By a small margin, it defeats D7200 and other crops, but that's nothing you can't fix in PP.

If your goal is DOF, then skip it. Crop lenses which match the DOF of FF are not existent. For example, what's the crop equivalent of 50mm f/1.4? It's 30 or 35mm f/1.0. Such lens doesn't exist or it's insanely expensive. Or 85 f/1.4? It would be 50mm f/1.0 which doesn't exist as well in the Nikon world and in the Canon world it is crazily expensive and not sharp enough.

If you'r shooting fast action and need the fps, then go for it, but I'll skip this.

Pentax K3ll with pixelshift has a lot more detail at iso 25600 Go Pentax:)

As a D7200 user I don't see any great advantage of the D500
Other than the tilting lcd which the next D7300 will have
I will wait until the D500 comes down to the price that it's worth which in MY opinion is no more than £1000 and whatever the equivalent is in $
I hope the price drops very soon
Tom G

D7200 is my best choice now at nearly half of the price.

"In fact, it's essentially ISO invariant"

To be honest is pretty hard to say from your studio samples, because you changed the lighting completely from your normal studio tests (ISO) compared to the ones in the dynamic range. The light comes from the the other side with stronger shadows and a very flat processing. So comparing side by side is very difficult.

In any case to be "essentially ISO invariant" the ISO100+6EV should be pretty much the same as ISO6400 shot, but to my eyes there are some significant differences:
* the ISO100+6EV shows more detail in some areas even compared to the ISO3200 (very visible in the threads left of the color checker)
* and the colors look much better in the ISO6400 shot.

However, again, the very different lighting and processing makes things difficult to judge.

Does anybody on here actually take photos?

This website has dynamic range paranoia.

I don't know but if you compare it to the Fuji X70 there isn't much difference in IQ. Of course these two camera's are totally incomparable but still... If you don't need the versatility of a DSLR and you're happy with a wide angle lens, there's hardly any reason to spend more then $700.

Front-runner?
For DR the d500 in identical to d7200, no difference at all.
For high ISO noise, if you look at JPEG, d500 looks better, but RAW they are the same, probably the d500 is 1/4stop better, and that is due to the higher MP in d7200.
So the only improvement is the JPEG engine in the d500.

You're sure this is "class leading" ...?!

Can't really says its any better than the A6300 ... Reminds me of their image processing from their J5 ... except on an APS-C scale...

D500 Raw files twisted?

A little shady aspect here is on the plastic apples versus oranges side:

43,2 MB for a 20 MPx D500 ISO 100 Raw is compared to a
30,1 MB for a 24 MPx D7200 ISO 100 Raw file.
If both had the same raw preprocessing the D500 raw file should be significantly (!) smaller in size, as noise at ISO 100 vertainly is not the reason behind the hugely different files sizes.

So what software twist is happening here?