Perfect Upgrade from D5100

This review is aimed at people who are relatively new to photography (~couple years), as I am in the same boat. There will be much more thorough reviews on Amazon for people who are already serious photographers, written by people who are actually serious photographers.

General Impression:

A wonderful upgrade from my D5100 after 2 years of heavy use. This camera is obviously aimed at a different person than the D3x00 or D5x00 series as it offers quick access to advanced features without having to go through tons of menus.

Construction/Feel:

This camera feels like a series camera. Coming from the all plastic D5100, this thing is built like a tank. It is noticeably larger than my old camera, which is due to the fact that it has more knobs and wheels.

Controls:

One of the main reasons I wanted to upgrade from an entry level dSLR was so I can quickly change

settings without having to hunt through menus to do so. This camera fits the bill very well and has a few major upgrades from my point of view. Fistly, the U1 and U2 settings are invaluable. Being able to have a group of settings stored such that I can revert back to them by turning one knob is major. Several times in the past I have been trying to compose one shot only to have a completely different shot appear that required different settings altogether. This takes a while to do on the more entry level camera and has been very annoying. Something that may not seem that important but I love already is the depth of field preview button. I enjoy being able to see what the aperture setting will actually look like without having to take a shot and review on the LCD. The final feature that I love are a collection of buttons/knobs/wheels that allow me to change things like shooting mode (continuous, timer, etc), AF mode, ISO setting, etc without having to get into a menu. I haven't quite committed their location to memory but once I do I won't even have to take the camera away from my face to make the changes. Again, this section here is really the reason I wanted to upgrade and I am not disappointed.

Auto Focus:

The 51-point AF on this camera has been a dream to use. I almost always keep the camera set to single point servo autofocus so I can select the point I want it to focus to. As long as you have some contrast, it is very quick and accurate to focus. A big positive in this camera over the lower level ones is that it DOES have a built in AF motor which means it will autofocus on lenses that do not have a built in motor. I do have the Tokina 11-16mm 2.8 which lacks a motor, so I was stuck manually focusing it on my previous camera. I notice this camera has a much faster focusing speed compared to the D5100 and also is able to focus in low light better, I believe its supposed to be a 1 stop improvement.

LCD Screen:

I do/will miss the rotating/articulating screen the D5100 had. I can understand why on a semi-pro/prosumer camera they would remove it (it could fairly easily break off and does seem like somewhat of a gimmick), but I mainly enjoyed it because i could turn it around to protect the screen while transporting. This screen is definitely a better quality though and shows much more information.

Noise:

Wonderful sensor, great signal to noise ratio. With my D5100 I would start to see things go down hill around ISO1600-3200. With this camera, I will be bumping that setting up to 6400 which gives me 1-2 stops of slack to play with. A little noise reduction in editing software makes the images completely usable. Very happy with the noise. I'm guessing the full frame bodies do a better job in this category, but this camera does all I need it to. Also, still waiting for Lightroom to update their camera compatibility.

Image Quality:

I'm not a pixel-peeper nor do I have the extensive experience to really discuss the image quality. It takes good pictures if I compose good pictures.

Battery Life:

No complaints. I have gotten a couple hundred shots off and still have half battery life. I do expect to buy another battery at some point for times when I might be taking a couple thousand shots over a weekend.

Memory Card:

I enjoy being able to put two SD cards in here and plan to always use them in the backup mode (in case one should sheet the bed). VERY IMPORTANT, BIG DEAL HERE: The memory you put in is very important. From my D5100 I had a few Transcend 16 GB Class 6 SDHC Flash Memory Card TS16GSDHC6E. When I got the D7100, i felt the camera was not shooting as fast as it should. I then bought one SanDisk Extreme Pro 32 GB SDHC Class 10 UHS-1 Flash Memory Card 95MB/s SDSDXPA-032G-AFFP and would like to explain the results of my tests. So i set up on a tripod the same shot with each card at 14bit RAW uncompressed, as many as the camera take in 30 seconds. The only difference was the cards. The results are astounding and are not a typo. I got 68 shots with the sandisk and 23 with the transcend. That's right, almost 3x as many. Additionally, but unrelated to the camera, when copying 30 pictures (at 23mb a piece) to my MacBook Pro, the Sandisk took 13 seconds and the Transcend 41 seconds. If you aren't getting high performance out of your memory card, definitely look into upgrading.

Flash:

The built in flash is pretty puny, which seems to be par for the course. It does provide some nice fill lighting if you're outside taking pictures where there are some shadows on your subject, but for shooting inside it's marginal at best. I bought the very reasonably priced Nikon SB-400 AF Speedlight Flash for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras and have been very pleased with the combo. The external flash adds the ability to bounce light off the ceiling and not waste the camera battery while doing so. This camera does have the Nikon flash commander ability which I will no doubt take advantage of at some point.

Conclusion:

If you're starting to outgrow your lower tier DX camera, get this one - you won't be disappointed. I already have quite a few DX lenses and don't feel like replacing them with FX lenses and I actually prefer the crop factor (1.5x teleconverter in effect) on my big nasty 70-200 2.8.