Recommend me an upgrade!

[Derrel]

Skip right ahead to the BEST APS-C sensor on the planet, AND the sensor that's in a camera well-suited to the lenses you already own...you can find your solution in the Nikon D7100. 24MP and multiple generations newer technology than the D90 has. The Tokina and the 70-300VR are reason enough to go with a 24MP APS-C sensor and a d-slr. That would make for a seamless, simple, true upgrade.

If you want to look at a pure "hiking system", you ought to buy something VERY lightweight.

Agreed. No need to go full frame. But the weight is a non issue IMO. The difference in the weights between the APS-C bodies is about the same as a granola bar.

Agreed...I was thinking, "You wanna' carry less weight on the trail? Diet and lose 4 or 5 pounds."

 

[LakeFX]

Agreed...I was thinking, "You wanna' carry less weight on the trail? Diet and lose 4 or 5 pounds."

I actually don't care too much about weight, but I would love to cut down on the size of my gear so it doesn't get in the way when hanging from my belt or strap.

While I could spend $1500, I'd like to keep it as cheap as possible and if I can't get both size and low light advantages, I don't want to spend that much. The D7100 looks great, but a bit more than I want to spend for something that big.

 

[TheFantasticG]

Have you looked at the Canon M or Nikon J3 or V2?

Personally if less bulk was my main concern and wanted to be able to use the same lenses I would be look at the J3 and V2.

 

[LakeFX]

The small sensor of the Nikon mirrorless models means that I haven't seen any true wide angle lenses.

The Canon M looks intriguing. I haven't dug into the details, but can it be set to have aperture adjustment without using the screen?

 

[amolitor]

Low light advantages are going to be pretty minimalist in your price range. Go on to Dxomark.com and pull down the "Cameras" and select "Compare Camera Sensors" Muck around in their stupid interface for a while until you figure out how to get some cameras "selected" and then check the boxes of any three "selected" cameras to generate a comparision. Select, say, the D800E and two other Nikon cameras for comparison. Click on the "Measurements" link to look at the cute little sensor charts.

Notice how for all the measurements you basically have two groups:

D3200/5100/7100/etc -- all the affordable stuff
D800/600/4 -- all the expensive stuff

All the cute little graphs in each set pretty much look the same, but the two sets are well separated. Yes, yes, the "I Own It" model is going to have slightly better performance than the "I Don't Own It" model, but the differences are trivial. In the "affordable" stuff you're going to get different sets of features, more megapixels or fewer, AF motor or not, better viewfinder, worse viewfinder, etc. The performance of the sensor in terms of how it renders color and tone, what noise characteristics it has, and so on, are all pretty much the same.

The more modern and expensive "affordable" stuff is definitely a little better than the older and cheaper stuff, which might fool you in to thinking you should totally get the D7100 for awesome low light performance. The lines on the chart are indeed very slightly above those other lines on the chart.

Then you throw the D4 up there or the D800E and you realize 'oh, I see. THAT is what good low light performance looks like. It's not one line that is a couple mm above the other one. It's a line that's like an inch above the other one.'

 

[TheFantasticG]

The small sensor of the Nikon mirrorless models means that I haven't seen any true wide angle lenses. The Canon M looks intriguing. I haven't dug into the details, but can it be set to have aperture adjustment without using the screen?

No from what I can tell. There was plenty of praise from reviews of the M on the touchscreen and functionality. Downfall is the slow AF according to the same reviews. The M2 was announced in Asia but doesn't seem anywhere else and Canon made it 8% smaller than the original M.

Look up the M as it might fit the bill to what you're searching for.

 

[CaptainNapalm]

The D5100 would be a downgrade from the D90, don't bother going that route.

 

[robbins.photo]

Fun thing about graphs - the wider the gap from top to bottom the more net change you need for it to seem significant on a graph. For example, if you were to compare vehicles and you were looking at one that had a top speed of 35 mph, one that had a top speed of 80 mph and one that had a top speed of 300 mph on a graph the 35 mph and 80 mph vehicle would look like they were pretty similar in top speed. In fact if you didn't know any better you'd swear that there is virtually no difference between the two vehicles just looking at the graph. Well, until you went to drive one for an hour or so, then suddenly the differences would seem pretty significant.

In principle I don't necessarily disagree with the former poster, but in practice there is a big difference between a D90 and a D5100 in lowlight performance. Now, would you see an even bigger difference on a full frame D800 or D4 - dang skippy, absolutely. Is it within your budget to spend the kind of money you'd need to spend to get a camera like that, and if so would that benefit in lowlight perfomance really be worth the difference in price - now that is the real question to ask yourself.

But if your on a more limited budget and you need better low light performance you will see a very noticeable difference between what the D5100/D5200/D5300 will give you and what the D90 will give you, same with the D7000/D7100. Won't be quite as big a difference as what you'd see if you wanted to drop a couple grand or more on a camera body, granted. But it will be a significant difference to most.

 

[LakeFX]

After looking at the SNR and ISO graphs on DXOMark, I have come to the conclusion that the D7000 represents enough of an upgrade to warrant a couple hundred dollars, but the D7100 is not worth the extra money to me at this point.

I would love to get faster glass instead, but that adds a lot of bulk that I don't want to carry.

 

[amolitor]

Yes, yes. The DIOwnIt it much better than the DYouOwnIt model. Let's take that as stipulated.

 

[amolitor]

The D7000 looks like it's giving you mayyybe as much as 1 extra stop before you hit DxOMark's magic 20dB line, which isn't a good place to be for anyone.

It really depends on what your personal criteria are, and what sort of shooting you do. You've found that ISO800 is OK, and ISO1600 is not, which suggests to me that your personal standards for "good quality" with the kind of pictures you take might land in that 30dB SNR range. You'll notice that the D7000 gives some improvement here, but not a lot. You're looking at some small fraction of a stop more sensitivity before the D7000 stops being "good enough" for you. As a rough swag at the situation, anyways.

 

[LakeFX]

Yeah, it looks like a small increase, but that's all I really need. I find that ISO800 on the D90 is just too noisy to use by my standards, but that 1/3 stop below that is fine. For the low light wildlife and indoor poorly lit action sports that I shoot occasionally, 1/3 of a stop is enough to make it usable. I figure that this minor difference in low light quality plus better performance in other areas makes it worth a couple hundred dollars to me as a minor upgrade to keep me happy for a couple years.

 

[amolitor]

Sounds like you've got a great handle on how to read the charts. Cool!

 

[LakeFX]

Sometimes my academic background actually comes in useful!

 

[LakeFX]

I was just looking back through some old images and I feel like an idiot. The images that I was basing my idea that ISO800 was too noisy were shot with my old D100 With the D90 it's ISO3200 that's just a bit too noisy for anything other than small prints and ISO6400 that's unusable. At that end of the spectrum, it's a full 1-2DB difference between the D90 and the D7000, which is much more significant.