Nikon D500 DX-Format Digital SLR (Body Only) and 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED Vibration Reduction Zoom Lens with Auto Focus for Nikon DSLR Cameras

For those of us whove been waiting nine years for the D300s replacement, its here, and exceeds expectations. Itll take you time to digest all this new DX body can do, but it truly does blast off accurately focused and exposed 10 frame-per-second bursts, do 4k video and time-delay sequences with aplomb, and shoot in impossibly low light. Robust build quality, menus familiar to Nikon shooters, and the flippy screen is more useful than you can imagine until you use one. Recommendations; Lexars 2933x XQD card for main memory works great; the Lexar 1000x SD card for backup had initial problems talking with the D500 but Lexar replaced it promptly with a newly revised card (new firmware) and that now works great. Most important: the 16-80mm Nikon VR lens released with this body is fantastic, a must-buy new normal lens for Nikon DX. Not the build quality or weight of the mid-range FX lens, but sharp, contrasty, quick enough in focusing, great smudge-resistant coating, and unreal VR capabilities. I repeatedly have shot tack-sharp 1/8 second exposures with it at 16mm, 1/15 at 80mm. See attached. 1/8 sec at f7.1, ISO 100, hand-held with the D500 and 16-80 at 16mm. Not bad for a 5x zoom walk-around lens.

Show more

I am blown away by this wonderful camera. I purchased this as an upgrade to my D90 and have already shot 2 magazine features and covers with it. This camera has the fastest and most accurate auto focus I have ever seen. Also the low light capabilities are mind blowing. I am finding more and more capabilities every day. This camera is making me look really good and I like that! If youre looking for a camera in an affordable price range that gives pro level results, you cannot go wrong with this absolutely wonderful Nikon D500. Also this seller was fantastic and the shipping was fast. CONS: while this camera comes with great networking capabilities an Bluetooth, Nikons SnapBridge is worthless. One of the reasons I decided to pull the trigger on this purchase was so I could use my iPad Pro as a live monitor on live shoots, but I was highly disappointed to find out that SnapBridge is nothing more than a marketing ploy by Nikon. The level of difficulty in pairing devices and keeping them paired makes it unusable. This is not an issue with the wonderful D500, but an issue with Nikons less than honest promotion of their extremely lame software, SnapBridge. While Im disappointed inNikons lack of attention to their obviously faulty software, I take nothing away from the D500 and give it my 100% enthusiastic recommendation! Maybe someday Nikon will take their software seriously and put out something worth downloading that will actually stand up to their as of yet false claims....(Fingers crossed!)

Show more

The D500 is finally here. Without any hesitation I can recommend this camera to any professional needing a fast, somewhat compact, fully capable DSLR. Ive shot Nikons since 1967. My last Nikons were a D4 and D750. The build quality of the D500 is definitely comparable to the D4 and much more robust than the D750. The button layout is perfect for me. I love the size and weight. The image quality is excellent. I could care less it is an APS-C sensor. Some will disagree. I think the metering system needs getting used to. The "Highlight Protection" meter mode is quite handy. Through consistent use, one will learn how to adjust the metering via the EVF function. The folks that complain about blown highlights may not entirely understand how the metering system works. I noticed on my D750, I virtually could not blow a highlight. The D500 meter does not appear to react the same. The camera is wonderful to use and shoot. I bought a used 17-55mm f2.8 DX Nikkor lens to use with it. The only knock I have is on Nikon, not the D500. Nikon needs to update the 17-55mm DX and the 12-24mm f4 lens for this camera. (Nikon has ignored the pro DX lens line for years!) This camera is finally the professional grade DX camera body many of us have been waiting for.

Show more

The D500 is the perfect camera for nature photography. It feels good in my hands, it performs exceptionally well. The viewfinder is large and offers a good view of the subject and the screen is great for times when using the viewfinder might be awkward. The setup of buttons makes it easy to make adjustments on the fly, and while all the varied menus seem confusing at first, with practice and patience it all makes sense and the camera can be set up to my personal specifications. This is clearly the best professional crop sensor camera and it has helped my photography to move up to a new level.

Show more

This is an amazing camera! Its basically a $6,500 Nikon D4 with a crop-frame sensor. That may seem like a serious limitation, but its really not that big a deal -- especially given the price! Especially impressive are the coverage of the autofocus points -- they cover almost the whole frame, horizonally -- and the low-light performance -- exceeding the abilities of my old, full-frame Sony a99. Just about the only thing I can complain about is that the controls are very hard to learn (at least if you are new to Nikon) -- I dare say inscrutable! But once you get used to them, they are amazing. So its not a big problem. Just know that you wont often be handing the camera to a friend and saying, "take a few pictures of me." This is a serious camera for a serious photographer.

Show more

I have been shooting on a Nikon D3400 for a little over a year and was ready to upgrade my camera body. The D3400 has been a GREAT camera and I still have it. I spent about 4 months researching a full-frame mirrorless (Nikon Z6 exclusively) and the D500. I went with the D500 because I liked that my current lens collection would work with this. The D500 hits the sweet spot for landscapes and sports, two genre’s I shoot in. The Z6 only has 3 native lens and no telephoto. The cost of going full-frame and mirrorless and purchasing new lens was too much. So what I LOVE about the D500. It’s shines in low light. I regularly shoot landscapes and astrophotography and you can push the ISO will little noise at night. There was a bit of a learning curve but that was erased by simply using the camera and watching some tutorials. The camera was been great at freezing the photo for sports photography as well. Auto-focus is very good and you have options on how/where our want to focus. You are able to customize almost everything! If you shoot with a variety of scenes you can create customizable scenes so you’re not resetting the camera from sunset, to astrophotography, to sports. The camera feels like a professional body. It has some weight to it so you know you’re holding a camera, but not too heavy that you can’t hold it still. This is an established camera in Nikon’s repertoire that is not going away. You get a ton of power for the price. I HIGHLY recommend. Feel free to ask any questions you may have!

Show more

the D500 has been on my "get" list for more than a year; I was disappointed when the 2nd Christmas season brought only the same discount as the 1st Christmas... SO, I bought one used, very reasonable here on Amazon,with a package that included XQD card & reader, extra battery, generic battery grip... price was good; camera was in excellent shape. learning curve is becoming manageable. (Mainly changes my post processing workflow...). spending a bit of my "learning curve" time on auto -focus issues. its beginning to all come together. there are many good reviews for the camera. what can i add? the xqd technology is really quick. the CH burst mode is quick. im surprised at how smart "group" AF-C is with flying birds, or other fast movement.

Show more

As an amateur wildlife photographer, so far Im happy with this camera. Ive only had one late afternoon of shooting Ospreys with it (EDIT: see updates below), and it was very impressive. Auto-focus is extremely fast, and the 10 frame-per-second shooting with a massive buffer is unbelievable. Im using just an SD card (high speed) and I get 26 shots in the buffer (EDIT: in practice Im getting about a 30 shot burst). My ratio of good shots to bad shots is already significantly higher than it was with my Canon EOS 70D, which is a great camera but not nearly as good at focusing as this one is. I took about 400 images today and there may have been 10 that were too blurry to make use of, and that includes a moment when an Osprey took me by surprise and I had to aim and shoot in about a second. The D500 picked up the bird and focused almost instantly. The shots are a bit softer than I hoped for, but I havent used the automatic focus fine-tuning yet. I was using my (also new) Sigma 150-600mm Sport, which is a good lens but I havent used Sigmas USB dock to fine tune it yet. So I (optimistically) suspect that when I use the cameras auto-tune and then use Sigmas dock to push it even further, Ill get razor sharp images almost every time. Im very impressed so far, this is a big step up from the 70D, where I would get roughly 10 or 15 bad shots for every good one. Not knocking the 70D, Im not a professional so Im sure I have room for improvement. Im also extremely happy with Snapbridge, mainly because it easily connected to my Android phone (NFC didnt work but bluetooth paired easily - Ive never had much luck with NFC). Snapbridge is now automatically geotagging every image. Thats a big part of why I got this camera - I travel all over the world and geotagging has become a necessity as far as Im concerned. Heres a knock on Canon - before switching to this Nikon I purchased Canons latest - the 80D. Not only was the 80D unable to connect to my Android (only worked on Android 5, and I was on 6 which has been out for months), but when connecting to other Android 5 devices, it was unable to automatically geotag images. After speaking to Canon support, they said it was a limitation of the camera, and suggested I grab Canons GPS add-on unit. Unacceptable when almost everyone has a smartphone that has GPS capabilities these days. Some other quick notes, both pros and cons: - The shutter release button is kind of "soft" meaning even when I dont want to, I frequently accidentally get a burst of 10 shots when I meant to take just 1. Not a big deal, Im getting used to it already. - The touch screen LCD is great, but I was surprised to find that its not "always" touch-sensitive. For example, navigating the settings menus is not touch-enabled at all. Not a big deal, but I was surprised. - The swiveling LCD screen is good, but Canons fully articulating screen on the 70D and 80D is better. I particularly liked that on those cameras I could turn the LCD around entirely, facing inward, protecting the screen from scratches. I already bought a glass screen protector for the D500 so its kind of a moot point. - By default, the camera shows the remaining exposure count in the viewfinder and the top-display. If you want to see ISO instead, you can, but it shows up in place of the exposure count. So basically you have to choose between one or the other. For me I went with ISO. Thats it for now, Ill continue to update this review as I get more experience with the camera, especially after doing some fine-tuning on both the camera and the lens. UPDATE: 5/1/2016 I spent a couple of hours playing with the auto AF-tune option using both the bundled Nikon 16-80mm lens, and my Sigma 150-600 (which is not an easy candidate for tuning). The system works generally OK, but repeated attempts give different results, sometimes with wide variations. The Nikon usually got a -1, 0, or +1, so I left it at 0. The Sigma was a lot tougher due to how large of a zoom range it has, and different distances between myself and the subject. Ill have to use Sigmas USB dock for this, but to speed things up I decided on a +3 (manual) adjustment after getting varying readings from the auto adjustment system (from -5 up to +6). I dont think its the cameras fault, the lens has so many ranges and subject distances that one value will never be enough. I spent another day shooting, mostly birds, and got some shots Im very happy with. Success rate is still very high, and mistakes have always been my fault. For example I got some motion blur due to not using a high enough ISO setting (and therefore slower shutter speed) a few times on an egret (photos attached). I went up to 5,000 ISO yesterday and used Lightroom for noise reduction, which I was happy with. This was in bright sunlight, but handheld at long range on subjects in motion so I needed fast shutter speeds. I attached more photos here, with 100% crops as well (although Amazon may shrink those a bit, Im not sure). More mistakes on my part, I forgot to switch the camera to AF-S for a squirrel and a turtle, both of which werent moving, and didnt need AF-C / 153. However the pictures came out great anyway. UPDATE: 5/8/2016 Took the camera to a farm animal event nearby today for more practice. Still a very good success ratio. I noticed something weird with Snapbridge. After connecting and putting my phone in my pocket, maybe 10 minutes later I would check and it would show no connection, and the camera would say awaiting connection. I would reconnect and put the phone back in my pocket, and 10 minutes later it would seem to be disconnected. I got annoyed and figured geotagging would be lost for many images, but upon importing, all geotagging was there. Not sure what the deal is but I was glad to not lose geotagging. I also made use of the bundled 16-80mm lens paired with a Canon 500D close-up lens today (using a 77mm - 72mm adapter). Everything worked perfectly fine, and Im happy with the lens. As always, I believe any issues with the pictures are on my end. For example a decent close-up of a fly, using manual focus, was focused on his lower body instead of his eyes. Hard to tell when looking through the viewfinder, I should have taken some test shots and then reviewed them at 100% in the LCD and re-adjusted. All close-ups were taken at f/8, but I should have tried for a better depth of field at maybe f/22 or something. Adding more sample pics, my apologies if youre grossed out by bugs!

Show more

Coming from a D5000 is a big improvement. Here is what I like: - Double the size of the image (20megs instead of 12megs) - Better ISO (can go up to 8000 without problem, before hard time at 1000) - Way faster (10fps instead of 4fps) - Video is 4k instead of 720p - Focusing is faster and doesnt light up a light like the D5000 - Compatible with my YONGNUO flash! What I do not like: - I can take a lot less picture. Around 450 pictures, the battery die. Before I could get around 600. - Video focus is very bad. I though people were picky when they were saying that it cannot auto-focus but that is very true. I have a small child and its impossible to get anything in focus. Also, the noise is terrible when trying to get the focus. - When you delete the RAW, the jpg doesnt delete. With my D5000, they were synchonized hence deleting a bad picture didnt needed 2 deletes. - The .nef is not working with my old version of Photoshop and not update available. I need to convert with .dng which is time consuming. - Transfering from QXD card requires a cable, I use to just pop the SD card into my laptop - Snapbridge was fast to setup for me. Didnt had problem like others BUT the application is slow. To take picture from the phone is impossible. The delay is about 3-4 seconds so if you have a kid, forget that between you press and the picture is taken its too late. - Snapbridge doesnt let you save picture into your phones SD card, just the main memory... that is a bummer. Overall, its an upgrade but it doesnt seem to be ready for everything. If the video could be usable and the Snapbridge working as advertised it would worth it without being perfect. Nevertheless, Ill keep the camera since its a lot better than what I had.

Show more

I cant write a comprehensive review to do this justice here (though even without trying, this has ended up being the longest Amazon product review Ive ever made). Of course, there are many detailed reviews of the D500 out on the web, so Ill leave that to them and instead just focus on the highlights, lowlights, and things of particular interest to me. Thus, in no particular order: Low light performance: good, fine, not exceptional. The pseudo-ISO range of up to 1.6 million is, as one might expect, mostly a gimmick. That said, images are surprisingly free of truly horrendous noise modes until you get above ~200k or so, which is pretty impressive and a significant improvement on prior DX models. Nonetheless, the quantity of noise is similar to prior bodies - I estimate only a third to half a stops improvement over the D7100 this replaced for me. Thats with RAWs. Its entirely possible the built-in JPEG processing has advanced and offers a more significant advantage vs JPEGs in older DX models. I havent compared. Bottom line is I still rarely share photos from ISOs above 10k, and those I do require plenty of careful post-process noise reduction first. Autofocus system: improved vs the D7100/D7200, but not as dramatically as many reviewers make out. Yes, having more focus points is nice, though in practice it doesnt seem to make much difference to key focusing modes like 3D tracking… *maybe* its a little more capable of tracking smaller subjects, that would in prior models slip between the cracks in the focus points grid, but it hasnt blown my socks off. And more holistically, autofocus is *not* as awe-inspiring as many reviewers say. 3D tracking is marginally better, but still easily confused in baffling ways. Autofocus speed is as always dominated by the lens. It does seem less prone to racking focus back and forth, though, which I do appreciate. But the biggest disappointment, as such, is that it doesnt seem to work noticeably better in low light conditions. I still find it struggles to focus accurately in ISO 6400+ conditions, just like the D7x00 line before it, even with f/1.4 lenses. And its general accuracy with large aperture lenses is still poor by my standards (i.e. many photos miss focus, especially when not using the centre focus point). Shooting speed: 10 FPS is definitely appealing. You get used to it pretty quickly though, and then only consciously appreciate it when you go back to using any other Nikon DX camera and they feel like slugs in comparison. Its gratuitous for most peoples photography needs (I focus on wildlife myself, and its only occasionally necessary). But, the big story here is actually the buffer size, and support for fast SD & XQD cards. With good cards loaded (e.g. Lexar 2000x SDCs, or Lexar 2933x XQDs) the shutter button becomes infallible - you press it, you take a photo. Nikons prior DX cameras drove me nuts in this respect, and Ive missed countless photos of the years with them. This improvement, with the D500, is actually one of the biggest draws of this camera, for me. Size: entirely subjective. Its still tiny compared to a D5, and its still a bit smaller even than a D810. Its quite a bit bigger than any the the other Nikon DX line, at least post-D300s. Personally I like the larger size in most cases - it leads to a larger hand grip which makes it significantly nicer to use for long durations, vs smaller DSLRs. Its also not particularly heavy, despite its size, which is nice. 4K video: Im not a frequent videographer, so in theory I shouldnt care much about this… but, the difference in quality between the video on the D500 and all of Nikons prior cameras - DX or FX - is huge. I cant handle low-resolution 1080p video anymore - it just looks horrible once you start recording 4K. While there are some wishlist items for the video support - e.g. higher bitrates, lossless recording formats, etc - the only real limitation it has right now is that 4K video is taken from a significantly smaller crop of the sensor than other video modes (not to mention photos). Sometimes this is convenient (e.g. for telephoto reach), but it does reduce low-light performance, and, most notably, really limits how wide an angle you can record at - even with a 10mm lens youre actually only achieving ~22mm in 35mm terms, which is a fairly pedestrian wide angle, and definitely not the super-wide-angle that you want from a 10mm lens. Controls: as always with Nikons cameras, most things are in sensible places, but some are not, and on the D500 some are downright baffling. Overall I actually prefer the button & dial layout of the D7x00 family more. For example, having a dedicated button for "QUAL", which as a RAW shooter can only offer me the opportunity to accidentally switch to JPEG Small (a.k.a. JPEG why are you even bothering taking photos?), is just stupid, and Ive fallen prey to its accidental use, and lost photos as a result. Likewise a dedicated white-balance button is a very dubious choice for a higher-end camera like this, where the majority of users will be shooting RAW, and those that arent are likely to set the white-balance once for an entire session (e.g. sports photographers). Lastly, the addition of the dedicated AF joystick seems fantastic in principle, but is in my experience slightly crippled by not being easy to reliably push in vs push sideways. There is a dedicated AF-ON button next to it, but I wish I could not need it, using the joystick instead, in order to save crucial time when adjusting focus points, and autofocusing. Flash: not having a built-in flash is a bit annoying, as it means putting a relatively heavy & bulk speedlight or wireless controller in the hotshoe instead, which makes the whole camera less usable in general, but especially for macro photography (where previously I could use the built-in flash to trigger detachable SB-R200 macro speedlights). GPS: not having built-in GPS is particularly frustrating, and I dont buy Nikons excuses as to why it purportedly cant be done, given other magnesium-alloy-framed cameras offer it. Nikon claim you can get the same end result using the SnapBridge app on your mobile phone, but the app doesnt reliably nor regularly sync your GPS position to the camera, so you can end up with GPS time & location stamps that are tens of minutes out of date, on any given photo. Essentially useless even if youre only moving on foot. And the app doesnt sync at all if the app crashes or is even just *not* frontmost (e.g. you pull your phone out to do something else, and forget to bring SnapBridge back to the front afterwards). As a wildlife & nature photographer I ultimately still need a dedicated GPS dongle attached at all times, in order for geotagging to actually work reliably. The only good thing I can say about SnapBridge is that while its active in GPS sync mode it barely makes a difference to the D500s battery life, though it shouldnt given it hardly ever syncs anyway. It does drain your mobile phone battery at noticeable rate, though. Viewfinder: its a significant step up from most of Nikons other DX cameras, though wont impress anyone used to recent / higher-end FX models. Its certainly very nice to have, no doubt, and other DX cameras viewfinders seem quaint and difficult to use in comparison. Memory cards: while I noted previously that its great to have high-performing storage, that lets you shoot at 10 FPS for essentially as long as you want, XQD cards remain very expensive compared to equivalent SD cards (despite the bigger number, the Lexar 2933x XQD isnt perceptibly faster in real-world use than the Lexar 2000x SDC, but costs twice as much). If youre a simultaneous-dual-card wielder, this is a problem because you essentially have a 50+% premium now in order to save photos to two cards simultaneously. Plus the XQD cards are *way* bigger, which you might think doesnt matter so much, but get a few of them together and suddenly theyre taking up a noticeable amount of space in your bag, whereas the same number of SD cards wouldnt even register. And thats without even factoring in the XQD USB card reader(s) youll need to carry around with you… SnapBridge: oh yes, one other thing… the oft-touted photo syncing feature of SnapBridge? Completely unusable. Its use of Bluetooth fatally cripples it (among many other flaws). Forget about it entirely. Get a CamRanger [or similar], or just an extra memory card & rotate periodically - one in the camera shooting, the other in a card reader uploading.

Show more