Usage of Digital SLR cameras has increased in unbelievable rate in past few years. There are few main reasons for that like reduced prices, user friendliness and low cost maintain. And they offer many other cool features like instant display after shooting, easy configuration, automated point and shoot if you need and ability of digital post production. If you go back in to analog SLR age, you have to wait days may be weeks to see how your photo looks like, cost per photograph was too high and in the case you need to do post production like color correction you have to go through complex, costly yet limited featured chemical procedure.
What Is a Crop Type DSLR
In the early stage of DSLRs, their image sensor size was very small relative to 35mm film. Hence, when it comes to professional photography, they never used DSLRs. They were limited to non-professional home usage. Down the time various different manufactures could come up with DSLRs with large image sensor like previous analog film, called full frame cameras. Their image sensor also was 35mm. However, if you consider the cost factor they were always many 1000s of dollars. Before those full frame cameras comes there were crop type cameras with smaller sensor, yet good enough for semi professional usage. Their image sensor size was like 23mm and around. With the technological improvements of image sensors they also could produce professional quality images, yet comes for affordable prices and quickly got popular among semi professional users.
There are many semi professional crop type cameras and specially designed focal length corrected lenses available for them in market. They have having exceptional image capturing capabilities and HD video capturing capabilities as well. Top of all most of them have total automated mode which convert your DLSR to point and shoot camera, which is good for most of home users. Lots of manufactures compete to get their market share and according to my study the best crop type DSLR camera you can find in the market it Nikon D7000.
Background
Nikon is Japan based electronic items manufactures and they produce array of optical equipments. Their most popular products are cameras. In the category cameras they have produces SLR cameras, DSLR cameras as well as point and shoot digital cameras. They were producing SLR cameras for decades and considered as one of the best manufactures. And their NIKKOR lenses considered as world’s best optical equipments not only limited to cameras, but extended to even military applications.
Back in 1999 Nikon introduced D1 which was a crop type DSLR. It only had 2.7 megapixel CCD image sensors, yet provided many other advanced features like any other modern DSLR. Nikon crop type sensor also called as DX format sensor. When you ate using lenses with DX format sensors, they behave differently that in Full frame sensors. In that case images seems little zoomed than normal. In order to solve that confusion Nikon has produced lenses for DX format cameras. With the time number of megapixels in the Nikon sensors got increased, CCD sensor changed in to CMOS and ISO performance got better. With all those improvement Nikon gave birth to one of their revolutionary DSLR, Nikon D90 back in back in 2008. It was having 12.3 megapixel sensor and Nikon D movies which is the movie recording capability was initially introduced with this camera.
With the extreme popularity of Nikon D90, the market demand for even better crop type camera which offer same and more functionalities than D90. As a result Nikon introduce the D7000, the best crop type camera ever produced.
Attractions in D7000
Image Sensor
The most attractive feature in the Nikon D7000 is its image sensor. Its dimension is 23.6 mm × 15.6 mm with 1.5 crop factor. It’s having 16.2 megapixels and capable of produce 4,928 × 3,264 sized images which are good for any professional application. Color space is RGB and bit per pixel is 14. Same as D90 it’s using CMOS sensor which is having very much lesser noise than previous CCD sensor and having significantly improved low light capturing capabilities. The sensor in D7000 supports 100-6400 ISO range and with the additional ISO boost it could go up to 25600. However in the high ISO ranges image could be too much nosier. According to the most of reviews available in the internet D7000 is having the sensor with best ISO noise performance. You can find more details about D7000 image sensor on DxOMark.
Semi Magnesium Alloy Body
D7000 was introduced as an improvement to previous D90. One of the most significant improvements I can find here is its semi magnesium alloy body. D90 was having total plastic body. Most of the high end professional cameras bodies are built with magnesium alloy which ensure its maximum durability. Additionally it makes the camera weather shielded as well. In D7000, its top and real plates are built with magnesium alloy which called semi magnesium alloy body. This could be identified as effort that Nikon put in to this to inherit some of the high end professional features like in D300S in to D7000.
Auto Focusing System
Auto focusing system is one of the critical success factor in semi professional DSLR. When it comes to High end cameras it could be not that significant because professional photographers love to use manual focusing. But in here the users are mainly non professional home users. To make their life easier with D7000 it comes with 39 point autofocus system. Further it comes with single servo mode, continuous servo mode and total manual focusing if you need it. Additionally it equipped with 3D tracking more which comes handy when you shoot rapidly moving objects.
In single servo mode user can select the focusing point or he can let the camera to choose the best one possible. In the continuous mode camera continue to focus with the changes in frame. If 3D tracking mode is enabled it uses advance algorithm to identify the subject and keep it in focus. If the subject is not focused normally camera won’t allow you to shoot it, yet you can easily change this settings.
When you are using movie mode unlike in previous D90 you can use auto focusing with D7000. It give you array of options like wide area mode, normal area mode, subject tracking more as well as face priority mode. This gives you opportunity to focus while you shoot a video with much more accuracy. However if you are using built in microphone it will record auto focusing noise along with the video.
Full HD Video Recording
Nikon D90 launched the D movie mode with 720p HD video recording and it attracted the most of users who love to do cinematography with DSLRs. As the upgrade D7000 comes with 1080p HD video recording up to 24fps which give you opportunity to make cinematic movies. D90 didn’t offer you a manual move mode. Hence the exposure will be automatically controller. Sometimes this give you trouble when you try to balance the amount of light in the video. Once you reduce the environment light the camera automatically increase the exposure compensation. This could be solved by the exposure lock yet not the perfect solution.
In D7000 you have manual move mode which allow you to change the shutter speed, ISO and white balance even while you shoot video. The change you are going to do will reflect in the live view real time. However still it won’t low you to change the aperture while you record a video like in most of the latest Canon DSLRs. Additionally it doesn’t support high frame rates like 30fps and 60fps which help you to produce real slow motion.
There are several award winning short movies available in YouTube shoot with Nikon D7000 which shows its exceptional video capability. You can see some of them here.
Accessories and Lenses
There are various accessories that go with Nikon D7000. One of the most popular one is its Battery Grip also called as MD-D11. It allows the photographer to shoot portraits easily with the extension to the camera body and allow using extra batteries as well. And there is range of flashes available which you can use to night photography. Same as Nikon D90, D7000 also having Nikon F mount which give your opportunity to empower your D7000 with any NIKOOR lens according to your requirement.
If you are going to do cinematography with D7000 there are various accessories, mainly camera stabilizers. Most of the standard DSLR equipments go with Nikon D7000.
Statistics
After the introduction of D7000 it attracted the most of the semi professional users as well as professional users. Most of the professional photographers started to use this Nikon D7000 as their back up camera. According to the statistic in Flicker, one of the most popular photo sharing community usage is D7000 is continue to increase after it launch, yet D90 is having most number of users. There are 9,961,804 photos in Flicker which was captured by D7000 at this moment and 2314 average daily users.
According to its market share, reviews, technology and capabilities, Nikon D7000 has proved that it’s the best crop type camera in the world. Nikon cameras will continue to evolve with latest technologies and soon we will be able to witness another crop type camera which is suitable for semi professional usage, which will be better than D7000 and comes with affordable price. Since then, D7000 will rock the show.
Tags: #Camera #DSLR #Nikon