Review: What do you get with Nikon’s $10,000 D5 DSLR camera?

DOES splashing $10,000 on a professional camera mean you’ll never get a dud shot? Nikon launched a new top model and we put it to the test.

Long exposure, HDR photograph of Brisbane city’s skyline, captured with Nikon’s new top model professional camera, the D5. The photo has not been retouched. Picture: Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson.

YOU CAN buy a multi-megapixel, sharpshooting, lens-swapping, digital SLR camera for $500.

So why would you spend another $9500 to get Nikon’s top-of-the-line DSLR?

We took the company’s award-winning, $10,000 D5 camera for a test drive to find out.

And we discovered there are even some trade-offs to make when betting big on your camera.

1. See-in-the-dark shooting

Even in a darkened, underground aquarium, the Nikon D5 captured the scene. The photo is straight out of the camera, untouched.

Your smartphone will take an image in dim lighting up to a point. The D5 can go beyond that and make results look crisper and more evenly exposed than you should rightly expect. This camera has serious lowlight credentials, reaching as high as 102,400 ISO natively. It’s a record-breaking achievement for Nikon, and higher than its Canon competitor. Photos taken at its most extreme setting will show noise, of course, but images are surprisingly usable at 25,600 ISO. I captured crisp photos in a darkened underground aquarium, and its lowlight skills are equally useful in concert, nightclub, and night photography.

2. Serious speed

The Nikon D5 is built for speed so you don’t miss the moment dolphins jump from the water.

The D5 is built for speed. It can capture 12 photos every second, and will even record 200 12-bit RAW files continuously. The camera uses a Expeed 5 image processor to achieve this rapid firing and, during continuous shooting, its shutter is reminiscent of a hummingbird’s wings. In fact, the sound of that shutter moving so quickly can be intimidating for those around you, and a dead giveaway you’re working with power. The D5 also features an option for two XQD memory cards, a new format that can record at speeds up to 500 megabits per second and store up to two terabytes on a card. It’s a big step up from CompactFlash.

3. Laser-like focus

The aforementioned $500 DSLR, the Nikon D3300, uses 11 autofocus points. The D5 has more than 13 times as many — an unprecedented 153 focus points. Furthermore, 99 of those are cross-type points, which can detect horizontal and vertical light patterns and are much more efficient. Put the D5 into continuous focus mode, and you can watch focal points dance across the screen, snapping focus on to your subject in fractions of a second.

4. Resolution to spare

The Nikon D5 doesn’t break any pixel records but it gives photographers more than enough to work with at a resolution of 20.8 megapixels. That’s a jump from 16.2 on the 4DS. Naturally, this is also a full-frame camera, meaning its sensor matches the size of 35mm film. This gives it better lowlight performance, allows lenses to work at their full length, and gives users plenty of leeway to crop images after capturing them.

5. Tough stuff

The Nikon D5 is built with a magnesium alloy chassis to withstand rough treatment.

Professional cameras are built to work, and the D5 shows the hallmarks of this. It features a weather-sealed body with caps over its ports to seal out rain, and a magnesium alloy body to withstand rough treatment (you should still avoid dropping the $10,000 camera).

Drawbacks in owning a $10,000 camera:

1. Weight

There’s no getting around it: the D5 is two handfuls. It weighs more than 1.4kg and you’ll need a generous backpack to accommodate it. It’s a taller, thicker, and 165g heavier than its predecessor, though its weight is balanced, and it’s lighter than its Canon equivalent.

2. Wireless transfers

This unprocessed Gold Coast sunset photo from a Nikon D5 was a significant size, even as a JPG file.

The D5’s file sizes are significant. Even if you just record compressed files like JPGs (and you’ll want to be capturing RAW), expect files larger than 10MB. As such, there’s no built-in wireless capability in the D5 or cameras like it. You can buy an accessory to make wireless transfers, though only to a computer, or connect a USB 3.0 cord or Ethernet cable to this camera.

3. Bring your own flash

This professional camera assumes you’ll bring a professional camera flash to attach to its body. It doesn’t have its own lighting source. That said, with powerful lowlight performance, you may rarely need a flash.

Nikon D5

$9999.95 (body only)

5 out of 5 stars