Nikon D500 DX-Format Digital SLR with 16-80mm ED VR Lens

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!

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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.

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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.

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