I’ve been a fan of the Nikon 1 (in my case, the V1) with the FT-1 adapter and a long telephoto lens as a way of getting extravagant focal length “reach” without spending more than a car would cost. The combination of the Nikon 1 and either the Nikon 80-400 AF-S or (more recently) the Sigma 50-500 has produced some wonderful shots for me. There have also been some misses, though.
The basic issues with the combination of a Nikon 1 and a long telephoto, in my experience, are:
- The FT-1 doesn’t support phase-shift autofocus, only contrast. That means that autofocus is less precise, particularly in poor light or low-contrast subjects.
- The focus square (only the center is supported) on the Nikon 1 is very large relative to that of DSLRs, and in some cases the square is too large to get a focus lock on something small or something shot through brush, etc.
- The diopter adjustment on the eyepiece has limited range, and for me it just barely adapts to my vision (and sometimes it doesn’t).
- The ISO and noise performance of the Nikon 1 is far below the standards of good DSLRs like the D750, which is my full-frame option.
On a recent trip to Costa Rica, where I had to shoot under the canopy quite a lot, I was never able to get a clean shot with the Nikon 1 at all. This set me to wondering whether there might be another option.
All digital cameras that can mount a given lens will throw an image of the same size at any given focal length. What varies is the size of the sensor relative to the size of the image. A full-frame sensor won’t crop at all relative to a 35mm camera, an APS frame is smaller and so captures a crop of the image, and the Nikon 1 sensor is smaller yet and crops more. Cropping effectively increases the focal length, so a full-frame DSLR has a focal multiplier of 1, an APS-frame DSLR (like the D7000 series) has a multiplier of 1.5, and the Nikon 1 has a multiplier of 2.7. It’s that multiplier that makes the Nikon 1 attractive for long telephoto work.
But here’s the thing. The Nikon 1 V1 is 10MP, and from the camera tests I’ve seen the later models of the Nikon 1 don’t offer better image quality even with more megapixels. They also don’t offer much better ISO and noise. But with sensors improving on the DSLRs to offer more megapixels, might a new Nikon DSLR (an APS frame model) offer as good an image as the Nikon 1 if the APS frame were cropped in software to the same dimension as the Nikon 1 frame.
If we had an APS sensor with enough megapixels, a crop to Nikon 1 frame size could generate the same 10MP as the Nikon 1, in which case the DSLR strategy would be a no-brainer because of the radically better ISO and noise performance and the autofocus precision. If it offered less, then you’d have to test to see whether the benefits overcame the loss of effective resolution.
I have a D7000, which is an APS frame. It’s 16MP, and so I did a spreadsheet to calculate the resolution were the image cropped to the Nikon 1 dimension. You ended up with about 5.1MP, which is just a bit more than half the Nikon 1 resolution. However, the newer D7200 at 24MP would provide about 7.5MP in the same crop, and the newest Nikon APS-frame camera, the 21MP D500, would provide about 6.5MP.
My first DSLR was the Fuji S2, which was 6MP, so my thought was that if I could get Nikon 1 image size with that resolution or better, I’d probably find the results would justify the DSLR route. To see whether that was true, I ran image tests using the Sigma 50-500 and both the Nikon 1 and D7000. When images from both cameras were loaded in Photoshop and cropped to the same subject size, both my wife and I believed that the subjective image quality of the D7000 was better. Further tests showed that the Nikon 1 won out in bright light with good subject contrast, but as light levels lowered the D7000 won.
Now the question was what DSLR to use instead. The D7200 works almost exactly like the D7000 and is the same size, but the D500 is the new top of the line. The resolution of the D7200 is higher, but the early hands-on experience with prototype D500s suggest that its improved sensor, noise level, and autofocus will give it the edge (at twice the price!). So, after careful thought, I called Allen’s Cameras (Levittown PA) and put myself on the list for a D500. I can still decline to take the camera if reviews that come out before delivery show something flawed in my thinking, but otherwise I’ll be reporting back here as soon as I’ve had the time to put the D500 through its paces.