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Nikon D750 vs D610

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Nikon D610 vs Nikon D750

As we have already pointed out in our announcement, the Nikon D750 shares quite a bit with the D610 when it comes to size, ergonomics and resolution. There are, however, some big differences in terms of autofocus performance, with the D750 employing top of the line autofocus system borrowed from the new D810 with superior ability to focus in low light. Let’s take a closer look at the camera specifications and see the differences between these cameras. Please keep in mind that this comparison is purely based on specifications. A detailed comparisons of all the features and their real world relevance will be provided in our upcoming review.

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Nikon D750, Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G and SB-500 Pre-Order Options

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Nikon D750 Pre-Order

Our partners at B&H and Adorama informed us earlier today that they are already accepting pre-orders for the newly announced Nikon D750, Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G ED lens and the SB-500 Speedlight. All three should start shipping at the end of September, which is in roughly two weeks. If you would like to pre-order and support our efforts, please use the below links.

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Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G Image Samples

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Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G Image Samples (3)

Below you will find image samples from the new Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G lens that we wrote about earlier today. Except for one image, most images were taken with the new Nikon D750. Unfortunately, since EXIF information is missing on these images, it is hard to say what aperture was used at each shot. On images with visible background blur, we can assume that f/1.8 aperture was used. Looking at the detail level, the sharpness of the lens seems to be amazing wide open. Once I obtain information about each image, I will update this article with more details.

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Nikon SB-500 Announcement

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Nikon SB-500

The last announcement from Nikon today was for the new SB-500 speedlight, Nikon’s first speedlight with a built-in LED light. With a guide number of 24m at ISO 100, it is not a very powerful flash unit (the SB-600 is at 30m and the high-end SB-910 is at 34m), but it is quite flexible with the head tilting up to 90° and rotating horizontally 180° to the left and right. In addition, it can be used as a commander or a remote flash unit and it is fully compatible with the Nikon CLS system. At $249.95, it is priced $80 cheaper than the higher-end SB-700. What’s exciting about this unit is not its typical features, but the built-in LED light. With approximately 100 lumens of brightness, the LED light can be used as a small video light or potentially even assist in acquiring focus in low-light situations. The LED light can be operated independently from flash, which means that you could actually detach the SB-500 from the camera and use its LED light exclusively, if needed. I personally welcome this innovation in speedlights and I believe it will be quite useful in some situations.

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Nikon 20mm f/1.8G ED Lens Announcement

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Nikon 20mm f/1.8G ED

Together with the D750, Nikon has also announced a brand new full-frame lens, the Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G ED. This lens announcement is really exciting, because it is Nikon’s first 20mm f/1.8 ultra wide-angle lens with impressive specifications and optical design. Not only does the lens feature aspherical elements and Nano coating for reduced aberrations, ghosting and flare, but it also comes with two ED (Extra Dispersion) glass elements that are typically used in expensive, professional lenses for extra clarity and superior sharpness. With a gold ring and a price tag of $799, this lens seems to be of superb value for low-light wide-angle photography. Looking at its wide-open sharpness (more on that below), it seems like the lens could be a great candidate for astrophotography. Let’s take a look at the lens in more detail.

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Nikon D750 Announcement

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Nikon D750

Today Nikon introduced yet another full-frame DSLR, the Nikon D750. Featuring the same 51-point autofocus system as the D810 and the D4S, 24.3 MP sensor, 6.5 FPS of continuous shooting speed, built-in Wi-Fi, advanced movie recording options and a tilting screen, the camera packs quite a bit for its $2,299 MSRP price tag. Placed above the Nikon D610 and below the D810, the D750 has an interesting mix of features from both. On one hand, it has a slightly faster frame rate than the D810, a slightly tweaked focus system and pretty much all the movie recording features of the D810. On the other hand, with the exception of the tilting screen, its ergonomics and body build closely resemble the lower-end D610. So what is this camera and why the D750 name? Is it finally the Nikon D700 successor that many of us have been waiting for? Let’s take a closer look at the camera and talk about what has changed.

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ioSafe 1513+ Review

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ioSafe 1513

Being a professional photographer, I constantly deal with a large flow of photographs that need to be imported, processed and backed up as part of the workflow process. Although I do everything I can to keep several copies of my photo library on different computers and storage devices, it is still a lot of data to keep track of continuously. Every time I revisit my backup strategy and make changes to it, whether by altering the process or introducing new software or hardware, the thought of potentially losing all of my images scares me to death. Years of hard work, client files and resulting terabytes of data make me nervous whenever I think about potential failures and disasters. Taking backups off-site is not something one can easily do continuously and transferring gigabytes of freshly photographed RAW material to the cloud is not only impractical, but can also get quite costly. And despite our attempts in keeping multiple copies of data at home or in our business offices, what if a real disaster takes place? Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and fire could strike any time and can be very costly to recover from. What if you had a storage solution that offered fire and water protection, with the capability to withstand temperatures up to 1550°F and protect data from floods up to 10 feet deep, submerged fully in water for 3 days straight? What if this storage solution offered scalability, incredibly fast performance and RAID-level protection utilizing the best of the breed platform? That’s where ioSafe products come in, which are specifically built for protection against such disasters. These unique solutions are powered by the award winning Synology DSM, the platform that I have been a fan of for the past few years.

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JPEGmini Pro Review

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JPEGmini Pro Total Space Saved

When providing high resolution images to our clients, or uploading images to this website, I often extract JPEG images between 70%-85% quality. Although some photographers often do extract their images at 100% quality, I rarely felt the need to do it, since file sizes get outrageously big, while the differences in quality are too small (and often impossible) to notice. I recently came across an interesting product by JPEGmini called “JPEGmini Pro“, which is specifically targeted at photographers like me that are looking for a good way to save space without losing image quality. By design, JPEG is a pretty compressed image format that was designed for the web in mind. It applies compression algorithms to reduce massive images in other formats like TIFF and offers the ability to use different compression levels. So when I first looked at JPEGmini Pro, I wondered how different it was compared to the JPEG engine used in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, the two programs I use the most to extract images. In this review, I will be exploring the Lightroom version of the JPEGmini Pro, which seamlessly integrates into my workflow without adding any complexity or unnecessary overhead.

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Choice is a Beautiful Thing…

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Nikon D610 vs D800E vs Df vs D4 vs D4s

Every once in a while, an article we post here at PL creates huge debates due to disagreements between readers and the poster, or between readers themselves on a photography-related subject. Sometimes such discussions lead to very productive results, with all parties learning something from each other. Other times, all we see is provocative and sometimes even insulting comments. One such article that contained a little bit of both was Tom Stirr’s recent post on post-processing difficult images. Before hitting the “Publish” button (and yes, I do personally publish every single article here at PL for different reasons), I already knew that it would spark up some discussions.

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