Nikon today announced the replacement for the D5000 as expected, the D5100. It's 100 better than the old camera, guaranteed. The new camera uses the same sensor as the D7000 with the fundamental body and stylings of the the D5000.
The swivel LCD now swivels from the side instead of the bottom, the battery is now the EN-EL14, there's a quiet shutter mode, plus in-camera HDR and night video abilities have been added. Another nice thing is that we get a 920k dot LCD, not the older 233k dot one. Video is now 30/25/24 fps at both 1080P and 720P. The new body is also slightly more compact than the D5000. But still, the basic DNA is recognizably the D5000, as the new camera has the D5000 autofocus and metering systems and basic feature set, for example.
Nikon has approached HDR right, I think. I've never understood this "you need lots of overlapping images to do HDR" thing that is being promoted by what now seems like everyone under the sun. What happens is you end up with a lot of the same data that has to then be curved against each other. The D5100 does two-exposure HDR (up to three stops apart), which is exactly what I do in the field. Expose for the highlights, expose for the shadows, you've got enough overlapping data in the middle. If you need more than three stops on top of the eight or nine real stops the camera can give you, you've got a different problem: you're so outside the DR that can be put on paper or on a screen that you've just made your curving of the data a really big pain to get right. Two exposures should be all you need to establish the toe and the shoulder data, and give you enough overlap in the middle ramp to use for your mid-tone blending. But I'm sure we're going to see a chorus of complainers asking why they can't have three, five, and seven stop sequences as much as two stops apart. Don't listen to those people. I think they all own stock in companies that make storage cards and hard drives.
Changing the swivel point of the screen has Nikon making a slightly wrong decision, in my view. Instead of doing what at least one other maker has done and put a tightly notched swivel so that you can keep buttons to the left of the screen, Nikon has instead moved or removed all of the left-of-screen buttons. As much as some people don't like the D7000's left-of-screen buttons, it does mean that with practice you can left-hand a button and right-hand a dial while still looking through the viewfinder. When you move too much to the right side of the camera, the user has to keep changing hand position, and that means you move the finger away from the shutter release too much and too easily. The Giugiaro design Nikon has been well known for is often bastardized on these lower end cameras when the engineers simply think that, because a camera like the D5100 doesn't have any "settings" buttons on the left, they can just move buttons whereever they fit. There's a reason why Giorgetto Giugiaro placed things as he did. And users of multiple Nikon bodies expect some continuity in control placement when they move between cameras. It's one of those subtle ways in which Nikon doesn't achieve Apple-ness in their designs. And once again we have Nikon fiddling with the Live View/Movie Record levers/buttons (now positioned on the top of the camera). True, the changes aren't a big thing on the D5100, as none of the buttons that were moved are involved in normal photography, but moving between a D5100 and D7000 will now present cognitive dissonances to a photographer, which I think is a bad thing. The good news? The FN and flash buttons didn't move on the front of the camera.
Also introduced with the camera was the ME-1 microphone, which mounts into the hot shoe of a camera and plugs into the microphone-in jack of the camera. But I have to comment a bit harshly on this one. Just what the heck is Nikon doing with accessories? They not only seem to be afterthoughts, but when we do get an accessory it seems to be a quick and dirty project that doesn't represent Nikon's full technological engineering capabilities.
Really, Nikon? Almost three years of shipping cameras with movie capabilities and you just now get around to shipping a me-to microphone that takes up the hot shoe and adds another dangling cable to catch on things? We've been able to buy those things for many years now, so if that's what we really wanted we'd already have one ;~). Not that I really want to plug in a microphone to any current Nikon DSLR anyway. The D7000's built-in amplifier system is decidedly lower in quality than the video stream the camera can generate. Even feeding a D7000 a clean, well managed signal from an external mic and amplifier you don't get great sound. And, of by the way, in one-person videography, the camera operator needs a headphone monitoring system. Where's that?
Note the more integrated microphone solutions that Sony (NEX) and Olympus (E-PL1/2) have provided. No cables. Hey Nikon, you used to be the technology leader. Now you're OEMing kludgey accessories? Is that really the future we're headed towards? I expect more from Nikon's talented engineers. We didn't get it in the ME-1, and we got it several years late. That's simply not good enough. Not for a company that considers itself a technology leader.