New Toy: Nikon D7200

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 09:48:32 +0100

Last month, I was abroad with my trusty old camera, but without its SD cards. Since the old camera has an SD only slot, which does not accept SDHC (let alone SDXC) cards, I cannot use it with cards larger than 2GiB. Today, such cards are not being manufactured anymore. So, I found myself with a few options:

1. Forget about the camera, just don't take any photos. Given the nature of the trip, I did not fancy this option.

2. Go on eBay or some such, and find a second-hand 2GiB card.

3. Find a local shop, and buy a new camera body.

While option 2 would have worked, the lack of certain features on my old camera had meant that I'd been wanting to buy a new camera body for a while, but it just hadn't happened yet; so I decided to go with option 3.

The Nikon D7200 is the latest model in the Nikon D7xxx series of cameras, a DX-format ("APS-C") camera that is still fairly advanced. Slightly cheaper than the D610, the cheapest full-frame Nikon camera (which I considered for a moment until I realized that two of my three lenses are DX-only lenses), it is packed with a similar amount of features. It can shoot photos at shutter speeds of 1/8000th of a second (twice as fast as my old camera), and its sensor can be set to ISO speeds of up to 102400 (64 times as much as the old one) -- although for the two modes beyond 25600, the sensor is switched to black-and-white only, since the amount of color available in such lighting conditions is very very low already.

A camera which is not only ten years more recent than the older one, but also is targeted at a more advanced user profile, took some getting used to at first. For instance, it took a few days until I had tamed the camera's autofocus system, which is much more advanced than the older one, so that it would focus on the things I wanted it to focus on, rather than just whatever object happens to be closest.

The camera shoots photos at up to twice the resolution in both dimensions (which combines to it having four times the amount of megapixels as the old body), which is not something I'm unhappy about. Also, it does turn out that a DX camera with a 24 megapixel sensor ends up taking photos with a digital resolution that is much higher than the optical resolution of my lenses, so I don't think more than 24 megapixels is going to be all that useful.

The builtin WiFi and NFC communication options are a nice touch, allowing me to use Nikon's app to take photos remotely, and see what's going through the lens while doing so. Additionally, the time-lapse functionality is something I've used already, and which I'm sure I'll be using again in the future.

The new camera is definitely a huge step forward from the old one, and while the price over there was a few hundred euros higher than it would have been here, I don't regret buying the new camera.

The result is nice, too:

All in all, I'm definitely happy with it.