D7100... second impressions..

TheLost

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I had a chance to REALLY push my D7100 this weekend shooting my son's indoor youth football (american) game.... I'm impressed!

The games are held in the evening at a local universities 'Field House' (indoor practice facility).
indoor-1a.jpg


That picture (taken last year) doesn't do a good job showing how dark the field house is due to it being taken at noon and the large bay/access doors where open behind me.... but you can see the tiny slit windows along the top and the small lights attached to the roof. On a cloudy day and in the evening its worse then most Jr. High school gyms :).

The D7100 was impressive to say the least! My D7000 struggled in the low light last year (it still did a good job) but the D7100 never missed a shot.

What blew me away was how good the images looked at 4000 ISO...
d7100-4000iso.jpg

D7100 + 70-200 f/2.8 @ 200mm | f/2.8 | 1/1250 | ISO 4000

That image is straight out of the camera converted from RAW to JPG and resized.. I'm sure running it through lightroom will improve it :) . I'll upload more images once i've had time to run them through PP.

I didn't find the buffer any worse then the D7000. I shot the entire game RAW 14 bit and never ran into any problems. However, i don't hold the button down often. I normally follow the action and click about 5-6 images per-play with maybe a burst on a pass or tackle.

1.3x crop mode is interesting.. but i'd rather just crop myself.

Shooting JPG's you can hold the button down for ~15 seconds before the buffer fills. I tried it... got way to many files.. but the autofocus seemed to keep up :)

And WOW does this thing Auto Focus... I'm going to take flack for this, but it blows the doors off the D300s.

Holding the body for a long time feels better in my hands due to the wider/deeper grip then the D7000. Weight wise i couldn't tell its lighter but then the Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 makes the damn thing heavy after awhile anyway.

The surprise for me was how much moving the AE-L/AF-L over just slightly improved using that button as the AF-ON button. If you are a big fan of using 'Back Button Focus' the new placement of AE/AF-L makes up for the lack of a dedicated AF-ON button. It is more comfortable shooting using AF-ON then the D7000!

D7100-afon.jpg

D7100 + 70-200 f/2.8 @ 133mm | f/2.8 | 1/1250 | ISO 4000

If you don't use 'Back Button Focusing' you should give it a try... It lets you shoot AF-C and still be able to recompose the shot. In this image i pre-focused on the tee then moved the focus point to where i assumed the kicker would be. Once you use AF-ON you can never go back :)

I'll run the images through lightroom4 and post the final results... but overall i was impressed with the image quality. There is a noticeable improvement over the D7000.

I'll finish up my quick 2nd impression post with a link to Scott Kelby's review of the D7100. Hopefully that will take some heat off the D300s lovers anger over my AF comments :)

 
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Truly nice to see real world/real time sample shots. Apart from its goodness, the D7100 may just also drive down D7000 prices! Thanks for these.
 
the D7100 may just also drive down D7000 prices!

I think you'll see the D300s price drop down a bit as well :)
 
Pretty cool, i rarely shoot my d7000s over 1250 as past that, you start seeing noise. these are really nice iso4000 shots.
im pretty sure it does pretty well at +-iso 3200..
 
Looks pretty good at this web size for ISO 4,000 and a crop-body camera!!! Really, quite,quite usable images in my opinion.
 
I was really wanting to see some higher ISO images. Thanks for sharing. I think it did wonderful at ISO 4000
 
Stupid question, but .. where is the DoF preview button?
 
Id love to have the D7100 but here are some I shot last year with the D7000 and a 18-105 kit lens at 3200-6400 iso and Im very happy with them.
 
Would love to see more pictures from the D7100. As long as I don't hear anything too bad from users I plan on ordering one in a few weeks.
 

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