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Nikon D4. The new king with uncompressed HDMI output.
  • 208 Replies sorted by
  • sebbensebben

    @bwhitz All what you say + The D4 will be an amazing still image camera. What was canon thinking?

  • AriaAria

    I'm curious how much of the raw IQ features of the D4 will float down to the lower cost cameras, cuz that thing is a BEAST! IMO Nikon needs to go all out on their DSLR's Video features cuz really that is their Pro Video dept. It's all good for us that they are pushing the other companies and they need to keep it going. 2012 is already shaping up to be a very interesting year.

  • stipstip

    @Vitaliy I'm pretty sure the 2 videos from 'Fenchel&Janisch' that you have posted are not genuine D4 videos. Those guys are posers, they have a history of always putting out videos when a new video DSLR gets announced, claiming the samples to be shot with that specific camera. They promote themselves on their website with the line: "Over 7 Million youtube hits!"

  • last_SHIFTlast_SHIFT

    Dan Chung seems to be the only high profile Canon user blogging about the D4. He was actually the one who did that interview about the 1DX where the Canon rep let it 'slip' that there is no clean HDMI out because of conflict with the video division. Good to see Dan keeping it real here. Can't wait to see more short film samples from D4. You would think that such a huge announcement would open the blogging floodgates.

  • bwhitzbwhitz

    @sebben "Why would anyone buy a canon C300 for 20k now?"

    haha right? Both only offer 60fps in 720p mode. Both have uncompressed 8-bit out. The D4 actually stomps all over the C300 with the THREE different sensor modes, the primary one being glorious FF35 VistaVision goodness. Plus, the D4 will most likely have better low-light capture due to new state-of-the art noise reduction and processing... vs a 3 year old camcorder chip. It's pretty crazy.

    My real question is... why did Canon just slap a large sensor on old camcorder electronics instead of developing a real system with something cool like Nikon's sensor modes? Why not something new like "Canon vRAW" codec or prores recording? I mean seriously, the C300 IS a XF100, from a technological standpoint. They had 3 years to respond and that is all we get for $20k? What a load...

    Oh well, enter the D4... time to go back to the drawing board Canon. The next "cinema" camera we see from Sony, Panasonic, or Canon better be at least 2k RAW and up to 90fps.

  • AriaAria

    Hey there's a very nice preview of the D4 over at Dan Chung's site.

    http://www.dslrnewsshooter.com/

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

  • sebbensebben

    Why would anyone buy a canon C300 for 20k now?

  • danyyyeldanyyyel

    I think the 2,7x crop is a one to one pixel as the gh2 tele mode. Now I don't think that you would see too much difference between a down-sampled 16 megapixel and a 8 megapixel image. Perhaps for noise it might be better but we will have to see. The WHY video is the only video we have, it is just that in some of the shot the skin etc looked very plasticky/lack of detail. It could be the bad compression for online delivery or super shallow DOF.

    On a side note it is becoming really annoying those super shallow dof interview where every cm the person talking he just moves out of focus. You just see at one time the nose and then the eye the mouth coming in and out of focus. I hope this fashion dyes because it is very distracting.

  • bleach551bleach551

    @danyyyel,

    I also am waiting on resolution. My thing is if the camera in FX mode is taking advantage of almost all of the 16.2 MP wouldn't the camera in DX(1.5X crop) or the 2.7X crop mode only be able to take advantage of something like 10.8 to 11MP for the DX mode and something like 6MP in the 2.7X mode.

    I mean wouldn't the Rumored D800 with a rumored 36MP sensor be better with 36MP for the FX mode and something like 24MP for the DX mode and maybe some other crop mode as well?

    Albeit that the D4 would be more than likely be better in the area of low light and image noise at high ISO's.

  • PixCanFlyPixCanFly

    Nice D4 video

  • danyyyeldanyyyel

    The only unknown for me is the resolution. The rest seems to be very very good. I expect most of these will go on lower body at least to a $ 1500 D400 and a $ 2500 D701 in the near future.

  • PixCanFlyPixCanFly

    Good overview of the video function.

  • GabelGabel

    DAMN! I just realized something... What if the D4 could do a 4:3 S35 mode (as the RED Dragon sensor is supposed to be able too). Then it would kick major arse. You all know what I mean: Anamorphics...

  • bwhitzbwhitz

    @amandaNL "Serious, the D4 looks like a nice cam but not revolutionary, just an upgrade."

    Well, the FF35, s35, and s16 modes of the sensor is pretty revolutionary itself... These are the kinds of upgrades I was expecting in Canons "digital cinema" camera. Instead we got a large sensor XF100 in a "cool looking" body and some "this is a pro camera" marketing crap that makes the fanboys go wild.

    I'd say at this point, with the serious stagnation from the big video players... just "upgrading" is a revolution in itself.

    This is essentially as uncompressed 4:2:2 VistaVision camera. No other cameras, not even the Alexa, are going to be able to top the creative flexibility and overall aesthetic possibilities of the D4 (assuming the D4 renders a real 1080p image). Could you imaging how much a "purpose-built" VistaVision camera with s35mm AND s16mm modes would cost from Sony or Canon? Probably $100,000+.

    Go Nikon!

  • GabelGabel

    @itimjim: I understand the price, it's what one has to pay for a top-of-the-line pro dslr, I just don't know if I'm interested in a DSLR at that price. What is cool is that the 1DX and the D4 both seem to really be truly perfect hybrid cameras (sorry but the GH2s stills can't compare to Nikon's or Canon's), but at a high cost where they would make more sense with somebody primarily doing stills.

    But it is a step in the right direction. Because I'm hoping Nikon will carry over features from this to their lower-end cams.

  • robbie75vrrobbie75vr

    maybe I don't notice that because my work must be done at max 400 iso.

  • jimtreatsjimtreats

    @robbie75vr had a look on dpreview at a d7000 review, it is impressively good, but in higher isos which is what I care about its not quite as good as the D3/D700 at 3200-6400+ it is impressively close mind, which I didn't expect. Certainly getting a lot of bang for buck, the dpreview concludes with saying the d7000 is the best performing APS-C camera for ISO, nice.

    Sadly it'll be months after release till dpreview get the d4 available for comparisons!!

  • robbie75vrrobbie75vr

    as professional photographer I can say that the quality of the D7000 is all you need for most of the work out there, unless you need some of the D4 features for specific purposes such as ehternet.. huge buffer size... fast shutter... super fast AF... in other words, sports/events/journalism or unless you need high resolution of the D3X for commercial big prints photography. The D7000 has an outstanding picture quality, better than D300s and D700.

    About video, I can't say a word if I don't have it in my hand and check out the footage but my hacked GH2 with Nikon lenses is just a monster at 1/6th of the D4 price. So for the video work now I'm just happy with the Panny.

    The only real feature that would really attract me now for video work, would be HDR as the Scarlet-X.

  • jimtreatsjimtreats

    Found a crop diagram in the official PDF here

    http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d4/pdf/d4_12p.pdf

    It shows a slight crop horizontally but in my eyes it doesn't look big enough to be anywhere near 91% in the horizontal.

  • LPowellLPowell

    @jimtreats Yes, I believe DPReview's preview is mistaken on those points. As we have seen with the GH2's ETC mode, 1:1 telecropping does not produce inherently higher video image quality - but it does produce significantly higher noise levels.

    At this point, I don't believe anyone outside of Nikon has had the opportunity to make a detailed hands-on analysis of the D4's video downscaling performance. The crucial issues of moire and color-tinged aliasing artifacts are what I'm most interested to see documented, as these are properties that would affect uncompressed HDMI output as well as H.264 compressed videos.

  • jimtreatsjimtreats

    @LPowell dpreview must have it wrong then, they said

    "Movies can also be shot at three different crops from the sensor, which Nikon is describing as FX, DX and 2.7X (native 1920x1080). This makes it easy to vary the field-of-view for grabbing footage, even if you’ve got a prime lens mounted. However, the ‘FX’ size is a significantly cropped version of the full sensor (it’s 91% of the sensor’s width), so the field-of-view will be a little narrower than you’d expect for any given focal length. Also the native 1920x1080 video will be higher quality than the FX and DX versions, since it hasn't been downsized. This difference is likely to be incredibly small (almost certainly irrelevant for most users), but is a consideration for high-end video users."

    http://www.dpreview.com/articles/7799914638/nikon-d4-overview/3

    I thought I'd seen a diagram showing the crops where the usual 3:2 to 16:9 crop is happening but no cropping in the x-axis, I'll try to find that again to settle my head. Dpreview are usually pretty thorough though, and the sentence on narrower fov makes you think it's not just a case of them getting width and height mixed up for the crop axis.

    Look forward to more samples, stills and videos to get more of a feel for what it's capable of.

  • LPowellLPowell

    @jimtreats The D4's sensor has a 3:2 native aspect ratio. Cropping that vertically to a 16:9 video frame uses 91% of the total pixel count, with no loss in horizontal resolution.

    @bumkicho The D4 is an 8-bit/4:2:2 real-time HD video monitor with a 16Mpix full-frame sensor that can use remote-controlled, electronic-focus Nikkor lenses and Zeiss CP.2 manual-focus cinema lenses. This is a synergistic combination of features that no other $6000 videocamera can touch.

  • jimtreatsjimtreats

    I am mostly impressed with everything I've seen on the D4 so far. As a D3 owner I'd be tempted to upgrade if real tests backup the claimed improvements over the D3s - 1 stop, which was already shown to be about 1 stop better than the original D3. I'd love to have video on my D3 body that was decent, it's hard to tell at the moment whether it'll be up to folks standards around here who have gotten used to the GHx with and without hacks.

    One thing I have read that I didn't like on dpreview's overview is that even the FX mode of video is a 91% crop from actual full frame stills, which is a little bit annoying to lose the sensor space, and more crucially the framing of a full frame sensor. I wonder why they have had to do this?

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