D7000 – Biggest Bang for the Buck

By John Eisele, Colorado State University

I am going to date myself here. I had the same reaction to the D7000 that I had to Nikon’s N2000 when it came out in the mid 1980s: “You’ve got to be kidding me; this light- weight piece of plastic is nothing but a toy... Wait a minute, this is one helluva toy!”
Nikon’s new D7000 occupies a unique niche in their line of cameras. At first glance, it is a consumer camera, sharing the slightly smaller body size, lighter weight and crop sensor of the lower end models. On the other hand, it has high ISO performance rivaling the D700 and D3, a 16 mp sensor and includes HD video, making it a very powerful tool in the bag.

I always find it useful to define why I buy any particular camera. My immediate need here was as a backup to the D700. I keep watching folks doing DSLR video and decided that it may be time to figure out how or if it makes sense for us, so getting the video capabilities in the body seemed like a good educational opportunity. So after a few months of use, here are my impressions.

What I Like:

This is a VERY capable camera. It’s like they shrunk the D700 down a bit. 14 bit capture? Check. 16 MP? It’s a big bump over the D3’s 12 MP iTTL flash commander? Check. High ISO performance? Let’s see, the dial goes to ISO6400 and can be pushed 2 stops from there to ISO 12,500. Check. Long battery life? Hard to say. The most I have shot has been about 700 frames in a day and I haven’t been able to drain it past 50% yet. It will do. Check. Did I fail to mention that it’s cheap? (I picked up the kit with an 18-105mm for $1600, body only is about $1200) It has a crop sensor which can be a touchy subject. I have dabbled with it for sports and speeches where the crop sensor works to my advantage. It’s a really nice walk-around camera, and for two-body-assignments I pair it with the D700 and I can either have a very extended range with two bodies and two lenses, or have a very tight range depending on which body gets which lens.

What I Don't Like

It’s a lighter body than the D700, so it is more prone to vibration and movement. The crop sensor encourages a little more reach and with the 70-200mm, it’s great. I have a Sigma 150-500mm zoom, and at 500mm the VR just doesn’t quite keep up with that magnification and vibration. That lens is definitely sharper on the D700/D3. Shooting day football, I used the D7000 as the emergency wide-angle body around my neck. Shooting night football, it was my primary body with the 70-200. Which brings me to the next thing I’m not wild about: the buffer isn’t big enough for my taste. If you are a JPEG shooter, it’s fine, but I shoot 14-bit RAW files and the buffer is good for 6-8 frames and then you wait. A while. It’s. Maddening. During. Action. It was worst during football, but I hit it with some frequency around campus. Little things drive you bonkers: the buttons to review photos go left-right on the D7000 and up-down on the D700. Arrrgh. The autofocus button is different. Not bad, perhaps better, but different. I now get to carry 2 kinds of cards: my D700 uses Compact Flash and my D7000 uses Secure Digital, giving buy.com more of my money.

Video

Understand that our office has 4 video producers and 3 still photographers.  I don’t need (right now) to be capable of doing video for us. We have people who are much better at it than I am. I am at the baby-steps stage of video. (I’m still a vidiot) The hope was that it might be useful to for us to have the capability to shoot B-roll while we are out on campus that can be incorporated into video productions. My sense is that we aren’t there yet. I sat down with one of our video producers to see how to set the camera. They shoot 720p/60 fps and weren’t impressed with the D7000 as it can be set to either 1024p/24 fps or 720p/30fps. It’s fine all by itself, but still looks kind of chunky integrated with better stuff. It’s the same effect as putting a point & shoot image next to one from a D3. It has also confirmed what I have suspected for a while. Good video is like work. Wait, it is work. The ergonomics of the Nikon make it difficult to hand-hold for video and, the on-board audio stinks! If we are going to do video at professional standards, it’s either carry a tripod and an external mic or get one of those DSLR video rigs. Either way, so much for light, small, casual and cheap... I think that somebody with video skills could have a lot of fun with this camera. I am going to try to do some learning with it.

The D7000 is getting a lot of press for its autofocus-during video capability. I’ll be the first to say that I don’t know any better, but I’m not impressed. It seems to hunt a bit, especially if there are multiple faces in the frame. I shot some family scenes over Christmas and the AF system had ADD—it couldn’t stay focused on any one person for more than a couple of seconds before shifting to a different face. Every time it shifted focus, the built-in microphone picked up the focus motor as a loud TICK, TICK, on the audio track. Shooting skiers, it took a second or two to acquire the subject and didn’t necessarily stay locked on if someone

John Eisele has been a University Photographer at Colorado State University for the past 11 years.