WebSite Malaysia.Net

Source from The Star Newspaper, 9 JAN 2012.

By TAN KIT HOONG
bytz@thestar.com.my

You know when there's an imminent launch from one of the two big camera makers because the launch is always preceded by a lot of Internet chatter and leaked photos.

Thus was the case with the Nikon D4, the company's new flagship 16.2-megapixel professional camera where photos of it were leaked a few days ahead of the launch.

As it turns out the photos of the D4 were accurate but Nikon still had a few tricks up its sleeve for the camera.

First off, the D4 features a newly-developed 16.2-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor, a 10fps (frames per second) continuous shooting speed with autofocus, and a standard ISO range of 100 to 12,800 (or 50 to 204,800 in ISO boost mode).

SUPER FAST: Nikon D4 is the company's latest flagship DSLR with fast shooting speeds and good high ISO performance.

The shutter has also been improved with a new carbon fibre mechanism that is rated to 400,000 ­actuations. The D4 also features a new 91,000-pixel sensor that is not only used for metering, but is also responsible for tracking subjects during autofocus (although it is by itself not being used for autofocus) and to determine white balance.

Talking about autofocus, while the D4's autofocus still sports the same 51-point autofocus areas, 15 of the focus points are cross-type, while 11 points can work in lower light and also with smaller ­apertures down to f/8.

One of the interesting features not obviously mentioned by most websites is that the D4 has a new Silent mode for shooting stills.

Silent mode, as the name suggests allows you to snap images without the camera producing any sound at all, thanks to the use of Live View which eliminates the mirror slap when normally shooting photos.

We had the opportunity to test out Silent mode and it was indeed completely silent, and we ­realised we had shot four or five photos without realising that we had done so.

The only indication of the camera's shooting in Silent mode is when the card transfer LED lights up for a second as the camera transfers images to the card.

Another major addition to the D4 is of course video recording, with the camera now able to shoot up to 1080/30p videos using H.264 compression, or up to 720/60p videos with contrast detect ­autofocus available during video recording.

The D4 also comes with both a headphone audio output for monitoring audio in video recordings as well as a stereo microphone input so that you can attach an external stereo microphone for better quality audio recording.

The camera is also about 100g lighter than the D3S, with most of the weight savings coming from a new, lighter battery pack.

The D4 has a dual-card slot, with one slot dedicated to CompactFlash cards, supporting up to the maximum UDMA 7 speeds, while a second slot is dedicated to a new XQD card, which is based on the PCI Express interface, promising even faster transfer speeds than CompactFlash. The D4 is due to be released sometime next month, and no prices have been finalised for the camera.

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www.nikon.com.my