Africa Wild

Eye, we live in hope!

The reason I don't have a D7100 is due to the buffer size, a six frame buffer at 6Fps does not a good action photography camera make

The cost of upgrading to full frame for me would be prohibitive, not only because of the cost of the body but because I would most likely have to buy new and much more expensive lenses. I need those lotto numbers too

So far, so good, I managed to edit some images last night after much frustration and mucking about. Adobe haven't got a Camera Raw profile for the D7200 yet so I have to edit the metadata to change the camera model to "Nikon D5500", I then have to convert the images to .DNG format before I can open them with Camera Raw. What a PITA!

I'll be processing the Marievale images this weekend now that I have a workflow - sort of!

Just one of the reasons I am never an "early adopter". The other one is to find out whether the piece of kit has any latent quality issues...

To chip in on some comments above, there are a few things to note. My comments are my opinions, but are often based on scientific and other research from what I consider to be reasonably reliable and oft-thought-of credible sources. Please do not take offence to some of my opinions, as no offence intended. Disclaimer complete

Firstly, it is highly unlikely that a crop-sensor camera will be able to match the low-light ability of a full frame camera. No recent crop-sensor camera comes close to the low-light ability of the recent FX cameras, so to compare the latest and greatest Nikon D3xxx, D5xxx or D7xxx to either the D6xx/D750/D8xx/D4 is a waste of time. The FX cameras will simply win hands down, every time. (I base my views on the low-light, ISO scores generated by DXOMark.com, as per their sensor ratings).

Secondly, the D7200 should NOT be considered as the Nikon equivalent to Canon's 7D mkII, but rather as a poor attempt to close the gap between the Nikon and Canon offerings in this segment. If Nikon ever did release a replacement for the D300s, that could be considered as the logical Nikon competitor to the Canon 7DmkII. While many features of the D7200 out-perform the 7DmkII, especially in issues such as sensor performance, it falls short in many other areas, including weather sealing, build quality and buffer size. The biggest gripe of sports and nature photographers, however, seems to be the burst speed or frames per second (FPS).

As low light camera, given the research coming out of the DXO lab's, the D750 fits in between the D800 and D800e, but the differences in low-light performance should be negligible. The D7200 insofar as low light performance is concerned, comes nowhere close to these. All things being equal, noise in pictures at high ISO levels will simply be far worse on the D7200 than on any late-model full-frame camera.

So what is important to you in your photography, as any camera and/or lens purchase is ALWAYS a compromise! Low light ability? Dynamic range? FPS and/or buffer size? Reach? Budget? This list can go on and on.

Just remember that the best camera is the one you have available to you when the action goes down.

Grumpy wrote:To chip in on some comments above, there are a few things to note. My comments are my opinions, but are often based on scientific and other research from what I consider to be reasonably reliable and oft-thought-of credible sources. Please do not take offence to some of my opinions, as no offence intended. Disclaimer complete

Firstly, it is highly unlikely that a crop-sensor camera will be able to match the low-light ability of a full frame camera. No recent crop-sensor camera comes close to the low-light ability of the recent FX cameras, so to compare the latest and greatest Nikon D3xxx, D5xxx or D7xxx to either the D6xx/D750/D8xx/D4 is a waste of time. The FX cameras will simply win hands down, every time. (I base my views on the low-light, ISO scores generated by DXOMark.com, as per their sensor ratings).

Secondly, the D7200 should NOT be considered as the Nikon equivalent to Canon's 7D mkII, but rather as a poor attempt to close the gap between the Nikon and Canon offerings in this segment. If Nikon ever did release a replacement for the D300s, that could be considered as the logical Nikon competitor to the Canon 7DmkII. While many features of the D7200 out-perform the 7DmkII, especially in issues such as sensor performance, it falls short in many other areas, including weather sealing, build quality and buffer size. The biggest gripe of sports and nature photographers, however, seems to be the burst speed or frames per second (FPS).

As low light camera, given the research coming out of the DXO lab's, the D750 fits in between the D800 and D800e, but the differences in low-light performance should be negligible. The D7200 insofar as low light performance is concerned, comes nowhere close to these. All things being equal, noise in pictures at high ISO levels will simply be far worse on the D7200 than on any late-model full-frame camera.

So what is important to you in your photography, as any camera and/or lens purchase is ALWAYS a compromise! Low light ability? Dynamic range? FPS and/or buffer size? Reach? Budget? This list can go on and on.

Just remember that the best camera is the one you have available to you when the action goes down.

Spot on Grumpy ...Nikon is basically a FX producer at the top end ...so there will never be a D300S replacement I believe ..I moved to FX with the D700 in 2007 and its a dream format..Sure like Blue Tuna said ..I had to upgrade a couple of lenses like my old DX rated 70 - 200 VRI to the current 70 -200 VRII version but what is the Buffer on the DX 7200 Full on RAW uncompressed 14 Bit???? For low light Wild life there is nothing like FX for low Noise High ISO (apart from my current D800 which is not really a nature camera at Max 6400 but just after sunrise its a beaut @ 36 m pixels with all that detail in the shadows and huge dynamic range ..but good lenses are needed and a STEADY hand or you will be exposed)

Here's the D7200 comparison by DxO. http://nikonrumors.com/2015/04/10/of-co ... mark.aspx/

As you rightly said, it is not as good as the full frame sensors but it is HUGELY better than the 7DII.

I'm sure that the 7DII has lots of nice gadgets and features that the D7200 doesn't have but in the end, the thing that produces the image is the sensor and, considering the 7DII is a very recent model, its sensor with a DxO rating of 70 (the D7200 is 87 and the D610 is 94) is not up to the standard that it should be.

As a Nikon user, I was pretty depressed when the 7DII was announced - it looked like a really great camera until I saw the DxO rating. I was very, very disappointed with the buffer size on the D7100 and had waited, impatiently and irritably, for Nikon to get their act together and produce a crop-frame camera with an acceptable buffer. I had to wait for two years because Nikon released the D610, D810, D750 and the DF (so that posers can be behind the camera instead of in front of it!) which are all full frame cameras.

So far, I have no complaints about the D7200, it's frame rate is 5fps at maximum quality RAW and the buffer at that rate is supposed to be around 3 and a bit seconds (18 frames). This is not fantastic, but it is acceptable for me. So far I haven't hit the buffer limit even though I use spray-and-pray mode when shooting birds in flight.

I try to make the best of the equipment I can afford, I would love to own a D810 but at over R50,000 it's so far out of my price range I need binoculars to see it and I would probably have to spend another R100,000 plus on new lenses.

Right now, I'm more than happy with the results I'm getting with the D7200 and Tamron 150-600mm.

Reviving a slightly old thread, BT, you have been doing very good work with that combo.

I see on another site they are saying that Nikon will unveil the D400 in September. Since the D400 rumours have been going for around 5 years, I will believe it when I see it, but it will make sense for Nikon to do this now, just after I lost patience (or rather managed to save up enough) and gone full-frame...

Thanks Peter, lots of hard work to get to a standard that's adequate

I see from another thread that you now have a D750 - nice - looking forward to some great results