Nikon D4 — Finally, a Pro Camera for the New Media Warrior

Nikon Singapore announces launch of the D4
The D3 was officially retired from its flagship status at Nikon yesterday, when Nikon Singapore finally announced the launch of the Nikon D4. We managed to hold it for a while, giving us little cold shivers of pleasure as we ran our hands over its solid magnesium alloy body and held down the shutter button just to hear the distinctive Nikon "click".

The D4 has all of what you would expect from the successor to the D3s — very good high ISO performance that you can push up to 204800, up to 10 fps continuous shooting with no mirror lock, and an EXPEED 3 processor that lets you plow through CF cards like Joe McNally on steroids.

And we haven’t gotten to the juicy parts yet.




But first, the low-down on what the D4 has to offer:

• 16.2 effective megapixels FX sensor (you have the option to shoot in a DX crop, since it’s essentially a 1.5x digital zoom);
• 10fps shooting with AF and AE, 11fps with focus and exposure locked, 24fps if you shoot at 2.5 megapixels;
• An Advanced Scene Recognition System equipped with an RGB chip that holds 91,000 pixel sensors -- improving the overall AF and AE, and actually allowing the D4 to recognize human faces which then tells the D4 to adjust its AF and AE to create a “more natural and appealing” image;
• ISO100-12,800 (Pull to Lo 0.3 at ISO50 and push to Hi 4 at ISO204,800)
• Improved MultiCAM 3500FX Autofocus sensor that works in low light and at smaller apertures -- working at up to -2 EV of exposure;
• 1080p30 HD video at up to 24Mbps with uncompressed video output;
• New EN-EL18 battery (21.6Wh capacity, CIPA-rated at 2600 shots)
• 1x CF Card Slot and 1x XQD Card Slot -- these dual slots can be configured to overflow mode, mirror more, or for one card to hold images and the other to hold video;
• Built-in Ethernet; Wireless transmitters compatible with the D4 will be released later;
• Entirely weather sealed and constructed from magnesium alloy (as with the D3 and D3s);
• Illuminated buttons for going ninja.

The Juicy Bits

Ethernet/Wireless Capability
The Nikon D4 comes with what the Nikon spokesperson described as a “web server” -- a first for the industry -- through which you can control the camera.

FULL DISCLOSURE: It’ll get a little more technical here -- having a vague idea of how to set up a networked media center at home helps. If you don’t know what’s that all about, just stay awhile and enjoy the screen grabs. According to Nikon, some technical details are fuzzy and Nikon is still working on the web app. But we probed a bit further and this is what we got.

The D4 defines a static IP address — or a device's I/C no. on a computer network — that can be broadcast through their proprietry Wireless Transmitter WT-5A/B/C/D (availability TBA) OR through a local area network that you set up yourself by connecting the D4 to a router via an Ethernet cable.

Key in the D4’s IP Address in a web browser of your choice (connected to the same network as the D4) and you will see this:


(Figure A -- Log-in Screen)

Selecting Shooting/Viewer would bring you to this:




Selecting Viewer would take you to this screen:

(Figure C -- Viewer Screen)

Now, there are three things you should have noticed by now:

• This is a web app (like Facebook on your mobile phone's browser);
• It is running on two different devices -- both of which are not physically connected to the camera;
• There is an on-screen shutter button in Figure B.

According to the Nikon spokesperson at the demo, Nikon has essentially built a web app that is stored INSIDE the D4 itself. INSIDE. THE D4. Once you get past the hassle of tugging that spare LAN cable you had in the store room that you’ve never had to use for years and hooking the D4 up with your router with it, you get a wireless remote that lives in a browser and essentially can be run on any device with a browser that can open GMail.

The D4 web app -- opened in the browser of an appropriate mobile device of your choice -- allows the user to choose to be either a “Viewer” or “Shooter”.

Shooter mode allows the connected device to act as a fully functional remote camera trigger, with Live View, that can control a great many camera functions. In this mode, you can select aperture/shutter priority, switch metering and focusing modes, and even auto-focus by touching the Live View image on-screen. Only one device connected to the D4 may use Shooter mode at any one time, so you don’t have to worry about having mystery devices throwing off your focus or fiddling with your camera settings.

Opening Viewer mode on the browser would take you to a gallery that allows the user to download full resolution pictures, attach them to an email and send it out. The D4’s “web server” is rated for up to 255 simultaneous connections, which means that you could have 255 different devices having instant access to what the D4 captures — a pretty exciting prospect by itself if you think about how it could be applied to any activity involving Photography and an audience.

The myriad of possibilities for the D4 user is dizzying. The photojournalist on assignment in an exclusive area could be wirelessly connected to a media center team located just outside the restricted area who can see what the D4 is seeing, download the photojournalist’s pictures and broadcast it over the Internet. The wedding photographer can broadcast a WIFI signal that guests can hop on to and view pictures as they are being taken. If the D4 could be connected directly to the Internet — because it should be possible to assign a URL to the D4’s fixed IP address on a network connected to the Internet — one could broadcast a live feed of pictures taken in real time to whomever has the D4’s address.

However, the web app hit a few snags that marred an otherwise spectacular display of built-in wireless connectivity. The Live View used in Shooter mode was a bit slow, working at what appears to be a refresh rate of 10 - 12 fps — more of an issue with the speed of the network than the D4 itself, but still annoying. Auto-focusing with the Live View image also proved tricky — touching the live view portion of the web app would highlight the picture in bright blue, making the entire Live View image difficult to see. Video recording is a feature of the web app, but it wasn’t working at the demo. The controls on the web app were also generally unresponsive — a software fault more than a device flaw — making it a potential sticking point for a camera that would sell at an estimated USD$6000.

But this is just the beginning of what the D4’s little “web server” can do — Nikon has not finished development for the web app. And if Nikon releases an API or an SDK, third-party software developers could come up with a much more polished and functional app, and could even surprise Nikon with features they didn’t think of themselves.

Given that what the D4 can do wirelessly appears to be limited more by software than hardware, it appears that the current web app’s functions could have great room for extensibility. Online image services such as Flickr could be made to serve up image streams fed directly from the D4, and a Dropbox-like sync for the D4 could be possible in the near future.



Verdict
The Nikon D4 is a long-awaited addition to Nikon’s line of professional DSLRS — giving Nikon users who decided to skip the D3s the upgrade they were waiting for. It feels and performs exactly as one would expect the D3’s successor would, but what would really give the D4 an edge over the Canon 1DX would be its phenomenal built-in Ethernet/wireless features. While the ideas and technology surrounding it is not exactly new, the fact that Nikon built this directly into a camera opens up several possibilities that would need their own articles to do them justice. We could expect this feature to trickle down to the older Nikon bodies down the line either through firmware upgrades or dongles that can be attached to the camera, but it is likely that 2 to 3 months from the release we’ll be looking at an horde of software — official and unofficial — that would attempt to take full advantage of the D4’s remote capabilities.