Yeah, what an ass. Informing filmmakers on the filmmaking forum about crucial flaws relevant to filmmaking. Good thing John Caballero isn't hiding behind a nickname, after all his post was so informative compared to the anon liar who started the thread sharing his irrelevant product experiences.
D5100: Nikon still needs to get a clue...
- Thread starter ydgmdlu
- Start date
Yeah, what an ass. Informing filmmakers on the filmmaking forum about crucial flaws relevant to filmmaking. Good thing John Caballero isn't hiding behind a nickname, after all his post was so informative compared to the anon liar who started the thread sharing his irrelevant product experiences.
13th Judas
Active member
Zim
Veteran
My point was the guy buying a camera knowing he was just going to return it and Martin having auto ISO is not a "flaw" it is what Nikon decided to do. It would be nice if the camera had manual but we are talking about a $800 DSLR.
John Caballero
Veteran
I stand by my comment 100%. If you want to find about a camera just go to your local camera store and try it out. Like I learned to do. If it doesn't work for you don't buy it. It is that simple. If it doesn't have the features you want and need then it is not for you. It is that simple. And once again I am using my full name to back up my opinion.
Juper
New member
I just want to thanks John for all the info. Certainly all this will come in future articles, but for the moment all currents reviews and hands-on don’t address this basic video questions. I think is great someone just took the pain to get one camera to check out by himself all the features and to share it with us. I don’t need a professional reviewer to do that, since we are talking about basic questions, just need a fellow camera user who is kind enough to share his info with all of us.
Lol, like if a big retailer or a huge corporation will care for any single buyer. Their only reason to exist is to get your money out of your bank account, and because my money is hard-earned I have the right to know if it is worth to spend it in their products. They already have huge profit margins, so a little hands-on for “advanced” users will not harm all their marketing campaigns for the “mass” public. All their return policies are well analysed and taken in account in their business plans!
Zim
Veteran
Well Juper I'm sure the cost is passed on to you. I really like to hear from people after they have bought a camera and I have nothing against someone taking a camera back. I returned a D200 once when it had a problem. But just to buy one with the plan just to return it is wrong IMHO.
I only moved into the DSLR world just because of video. I owned a D90 that I sold since it was not a good video camera, I was wanting an articulated screen camera, so I settled for the d3100 4 months ago waiting for a Nikon with an articulated screen and exposure control. I was about to add the D5100. Nikon you not only just lost a sale for limiting exposure setting in the d5100 but you might end up loosing a customer as I am now looking at the canon 60D.
AndrewGentle
Well-known member
Some of us have an existing investment in gelded (no aperture ring) Nikon glass and dislike lens adaptors.
Efexone
Well-known member
So the argument is on how nikon has crippled people who invested in G lenses and want to shoot video? (I have 11 nikkors myself - three are G's)
My point was thats its ignorant to complain about a product that doesn't achieve certain functionality at a set price point. D5100 not good enough? D7000 isn't too far away.
My point was thats its ignorant to complain about a product that doesn't achieve certain functionality at a set price point. D5100 not good enough? D7000 isn't too far away.
ydgmdlu
Veteran
Apparently, you have little understanding of how the business works. How did my actions cost Nikon money?
The store isn't selling the camera on behalf of Nikon for a commission; the store bought the camera at wholesale price. So Nikon already made money on the unit that I returned. And I was never going to buy a D5100 to keep anyway, so neither Nikon nor Best Buy ultimately "lost a sale."
As for Best Buy, I don't know what their restocking policies are (except that there's no fee to the customer), but I can agree that they'll likely offer the returned unit at a marked-down "open box" price. Does that "cost" Best Buy anything? It's a matter of semantics: Surely they would not sell for less than what they paid for it; in other words, they would not be selling it "at cost." They would earn less profit, but in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty insignificant, perhaps a fraction of a percent of how much they earn in a week or a month.
Then again, maybe they won't do a mark-down, if they decide that a subsequent customer won't be able to tell the difference. Wal-Mart has been known to resell, as "new," plenty of items that have blatantly been used.
Big-box retailers don't make much money on pricey electronics anyway. Instead, they rely on superfluous extended warranties, overpriced cables and other accessories, and shady upselling tactics (such as using composite A/V cables on one TV and HDMI on another to exaggerate the image quality difference), all of which exploit consumers through FUD.
All that I did was take advantage of the store's policies. In that sense, I did not "cheat." In Punch-Drunk Love, which was inspired by a real-life incident, Adam Sandler's character takes advantage of an oversight in the rules for a Healthy Choice promotion. He claimed over a million airline miles, which actually did cost Healthy Choice a significant amount of money.
Are you really going to argue that people shouldn't do something like that because it's "wrong"? We're talking about business here, and what matters is following the rules that are set forth, not personal feelings. Besides, how many low-budget and student filmmakers, even here at DVXuser, have been guilty of buying supplies at Wal-Mart and then returning them after wrapping production?
BTW, fun fact: The Best Buy clerk in the camera department actually suggested to me, while explaining why there was no D5100 demo unit yet, that I could buy the camera to return it later, as an alternative option. He used the phrase "risk-free trial."
OMG, that really misses the point. First of all, why would you cite Nikon Rumors when I already had the camera in my hands? But more importantly, being able to set aperture for video recording is old news. This was possible from Day One when the D90 was released; one just had to use manual lenses. So why mention it?
How?
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ydgmdlu
Veteran
For that same $800, you could buy a T2i, and it gives you manual control over aperture, shutter speed, AND ISO for video. The D5100 only does manual aperture for video. My point is that for Nikon to claim to be serious about video on DSLRs (they even made an external microphone for the D5100, after all) and remain competitive with Canon, "crippling" the video functionality on the D5100 is simply unreasonable. If people don't complain about this, then Nikon will continue to be out-of-touch with customers and will have little motivation to innovate and stay competitive with rivals like Canon. Is that what you want?
In the marketplace, customers are supposed to have ultimate power, not companies. You vote with your dollars, and if you don't like what a company is doing, then don't buy its products. If you buy and then rationalize away the problems, then you've effectively forfeited your power as a customer. You're letting the company dictate what's good for you, not encouraging it to learn about your actual needs.
The lowest price for a D7000 body is about $1200; some sites offering that price are actually selling refurbished units. In any case, $400 is not an insignificant difference; it is, after all, 50% of the D5100's price. Most people who want to buy an $800 DSLR are looking in that price range because they can't afford a $1200 DSLR. If $400 were not a big difference, then why would anyone buy anything less than an $900 DSLR (since entry-level models start at $500)?
Efexone
Well-known member
Efexone
Well-known member
you do know that nikon mainly caters their product line to PHOTOGRAPHY, right? They also manufacture some of the highest quality, most precise scanning/stepping equipment in the world. you make up a very very small percentage of thier conusmer base. that you require features at a lower price point makes no difference and shouldn't make a difference to nikon.
the mention that they dont innovate... d3s? d7000? nano crystal?
because you dont want to fork up an extra $400, this has become a lesson in economics? theres plenty of competition from other manufactures that you already said meet you needs in terms of functionality.
$1200 for a camera body as functional as the D7000 is cheep, and by that, I'm NOT referring to the video aspect of the camera.
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John Caballero
Veteran
Well, after all is said and done Nikon has the d7000 for those who want the manual control. If a person is making a living from photography or video investing a few hundred extra bucks for it should be no problem. The way it works is that after a few jobs you make your investment back. For those who are not making money from their cameras it 's another story. And Nikon will make money from both the D5100 AND D7000, you can count on that.
ydgmdlu
Veteran
So basically, you're saying that reviews (for anything, not just cameras) are a total waste of time for people to write and for others to read. OK, I'm glad that we're clear now.
I really didn't want to go through the trouble of buying and returning, but like I said, the Best Buy did not have a demo unit available. At the time that I started this thread, no in-depth reviews had been posted by the major sites yet. Nikon did not explicitly state the lack of manual exposure features in video recording, and there was plenty of chatter stating that such features were implemented. Not so simple, is it? The only way that I was able to know the truth of the matter ASAP was by buying the camera to test it.
As another user said earlier in this thread, some people bought the D5100 under the false impression that it would have the same video features as the D7000, and now they have to suffer the inconvenience of returning it. Some others were planning to pull the trigger on the purchase as soon as the camera became available. Since no one else was spreading the information before I did, this thread has surely helped some people to avoid a mistake. Plus, because most people these days buy cameras from online stores (or at least most members of this forum do), they actually lose money by returning a camera, as online stores don't normally cover the return shipping cost.
Also note that there are plenty of people who live in cities and towns whose stores don't stock certain models. Thus, they have to rely on the information that others share on the Internet. And sometimes, you can't know for sure whether a product will work for you until you've used it for a few days; that's why return policies exist.
A side note: I'm pretty sure that people who disapprove of others buying a product with the intent to return it would see nothing wrong with the practice of going to a brick-and-mortar retailer, trying a camera in-store, and then buying the same model from an online store (i.e, never intending to buy from the brick-and-mortar place). But this practice is also arguably "wrong" because stores make demo units available specifically to help sell their own stock, not some other store's stock. Brick-and-mortar stores could easily put away all demo units and insist that customers buy before they can try, just as online stores do out of necessity.
Furthermore, when you buy a product online instead of in a local store, you are "costing" that store money because they can't make a profit from you when you don't buy the same product from them. They've lost a customer by allowing you to take advantage of their demo units.
BTW, "ydgmdlu" is hardly an anonymous online identity. I'm the only person in the world who uses that handle anywhere, I use it just about everywhere. One can find my real name near the top of the Google results for "ydgmdlu."
They will make money because the D7000 is a kickass still camera. The jury is still out on the d5100. But this a filmmakers site and I don't see any reason to jump ship from Canon from a video perspective.
At the very least, Nikon should be on par with the video features of the Canons. I own a 5D Mark II and love the image quality and I also bought the Pana GH2, which I feel is the best overall HDDSLR hands down for the money.
John Caballero
Veteran
If they are done by Barry Green, Phillip Bloom, Hunter Richards and a few others I really love them and appreciate them. They all use their full names and are industry leaders by the way.
I am sure the D5100 will take as good stills as the D7000. Manual controls or lack thereof seems to be the difference so far. Also body size. There are thousands upon thousands of costumers out there that really don't care about manual controls on video. Mostly regular people that enjoy taking pictures and video from the same camera. Believe or not.
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AndrewGentle
Well-known member
Not at all. I have no problem with G lenses. My 50 mm lens has an aperture ring and it's always set to the f/22 Auto position so that the camera can instead control it itself. I have no reason to use an aperture ring unless I need to resort to what is, essentially, a hack to fit the lens on to a Canon body. What we want is for Nikon to match Canon's functionality at the same price point so we don't have to resort to using Canon bodies and hacks.
Efexone
Well-known member
heh
you do have a problem with G lenses because by not offering certain functionality in their current crop of camera bodies, nikon has sudo-crippled their video users as well as making it difficult and half-assed to adapt G lenses to other camera bodies. As much as I wish Nikon would get more serious with their offerings in video, I know that at the end of the day, camera bodies come and go and what matters will always be the lenses. This is why I stick AF-D and AI-S glass. G lenses are great but you need to consider what you sacrificing by buying into that technology. Everything from the abandonment of the aperture ring, the long term reliability of the VR mechanism, the adaptability to other lens mounts, should be considered before buying into the very proprietary G nikkors.