A while ago I needed a speedy camera for a pretty interesting job. I was hired by the Swedish Royal Court, to document a visit by the Swedish Royal Family to Tokyo (sadly, I’m not able to share those photos on this website right now). After looking at what my options were, I ended up picking up a used Nikon D500 that I found in pristine condition, offered at a price that I couldn’t resist. The day after the assignment with the royal family was over, I went to Hawaii with my wife and decided to only pack the D500, to further familiarize myself with Nikon’s flagship APS-C camera, and to decide if it was worthy of a permanent place in my camera bag.
Build Quality
The Nikon D500 is the little brother to the Nikon D5, a camera that is still the top of the line full-frame camera for sports and news shooters all over the world. The D500 inherits many of the things that make its bigger sibling such a popular choice. Sure, the burst rate has been dialled back from 12fps in the D5 to 10fps in the D500, but they both feature a 21-megapixel sensor (capable of 4K video) and the same 153-point autofocusing system (with 99 cross-type points).
The biggest differentiator is that the D500 uses an APS-C sized sensor, housed in a body that is considerably smaller and lighter and that it doesn’t feature a built-in vertical battery grip. The battery life is also considerably less impressive -- Instead of the 3500+ frames that the D5 will get on one charge of its massive battery, the D500 uses the same EN-EL15 battery featured in most other prosumer Nikon cameras (D800, D810 etc), good for roughly 1200+ shots. But considering how light, cheap and abundant the EN-EL 15 batteries are, this was not something I considered a big issue. And oh, did I mention that the launch price of the D500 was less than one-third of the price of the Nikon D5?
The weight of the body is just right -- heavy enough to balance nicely with most lenses I tried it with, yet light enough to hang on my shoulder for entire days without causing any discomfort. The grip is also the most comfortable one I’ve had the pleasure to experience, much deeper than the D800 and D810, and perfect for my bigger-than-average hands.
Despite having a tiltable screen -- probably the first for any prosumer Nikon camera -- the body feels rugged and sturdy enough to handle the work of most pros, although I’m not sure if it would survive a drop or hit with the tilting screen extended out, the hinge is likely the weakest part of the entire package.
Questionable durability aside, the screen is great. It’s the same 2.36-megapixel high-resolution panel as in the D5, and it has the same touchscreen functionality as well. Although I personally still hasn’t learned to appreciate touch controls on a “serious” camera -- partly because the physical controls are so good -- I do know that the inclusion of touch controls is something that will make many users very very happy.
Handling
The Nikon D500 handles wonderfully. It feels much more nimble than my D810, both in general operation as well as autofocus speed and accuracy. If anything, the autofocusing system of the D500 is what I would consider one of it’s strongest points. Even today, in early 2020, it is as good as it gets in the Nikon DSLR world. In fact, this camera made me feel that it was time to retire my D810 and update it to a D850, which shares the same much-improved autofocusing system. (But in the end, I got a Z7 instead, and still keep my D810 as my secondary camera). For anyone who needs to be able to follow subjects quickly and reliably across the entire frame, the D500 remains an excellent choice, and due to the smaller sensor size, it might actually be a better choice than the D5, as the autofocus points only cover a smaller portion of the bigger brothers entire frame.
Image Quality
So let’s get to the elephant in the room - Image Quality. as previously mentioned, the Nikon D500 is a APS-C camera, with a sensor size roughly just half the size of the full-frame cameras I’ve been using for most of my professional work since the release of the Canon 5D (mark I) back in 2005. While I’ve used several smaller sensor cameras privately since then, I was worried if a camera like this would be good enough to warrant a permanent place in my camera bag. The dilemma was that the D500 is still a bit too big and bulky to be what I consider a “carry everywhere camera”, ie. one that I won’t think twice about bringing with me out, even on days when I’m not intending to do any serious photography work. On the other hand, I was struggling to find reasons to bring this camera to professional assignments -- If the image quality is considerably lower than what I get from the D810, this wouldn’t make much sense. And I very rarely do work that requires me to bring two cameras.
While the D500 performed really well on the assignment I did for the royal family, where quick bursts were necessary to make sure to capture at least one with a usable facial expression, that kind of conditions are also rare in my regular work. And I never shoot sports, further making the strongest feature of the camera one that I rarely would make use of in practical terms.
So what are my thoughts after a few weeks of intensive use of the Nikon D500, both professionally and privately? Well, sadly I decided against this camera. While the APS-C image quality is good enough for most practical intents and purposes, both for my private photography as well as for my professional work, it is still a noticeable downgrade from my full-frame cameras. Dynamic range is lacking somewhat, and the tonal range feels narrower too. While it’s certainly good enough for web-use, the difference does become apparent when printing large or pixel-peeping. There’s also a considerable drop in resolution, going from 36 megapixels down to 21. While acceptable to some, my personal opinion is that higher is usually better, especially when shooting at night and noise can become a problem. Downsizing a 36 megapixel (or higher) photo to web-use resolution will have the added benefit of cleaning up the noise nicely. But when the original raw file is just a little over half of that resolution, this effect is far less noticeable.
And since a large chunk of the work I do these days is portraiture, it makes the APS-C proposition even more difficult to accept, as the smaller sensor gives me less flexibility in terms of controlling the depth of field, or to combine shallow depth of field with perspectives wide enough to maintain some context of the scene.
Video
While I first thought I would be able to make some use of the 4K video capabilities of this camera, that too ended up being a false assumption. The fact that the camera has both a mic- and a headphone socket is a huge plus, and the quality of the 4K video files from the D500 has a bitrate of over 100mbps, which is good enough, at least for someone who doesn’t plan to do any excessive colour grading or other advanced post-production. The problem, however, is that the 4K video mode comes with an extreme crop, only using the central portion of the sensor. In total, you get a 2,25x crop when shooting 4K video with the D500. This means that you would need extreme wide-angle lenses to get anything useful out of this, and depth of field control would be even less flexible than when shooting stills. The 10mm wide-angle lens that I was using when I tried the video function, turned into 22,5 mm equivalent. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any lens at all that will give you a wider perspective at all. While 22,5mm is still on the wider side of things, there are certainly times when it’s not wide enough. So if wide-angle video and/or control over depth of field is important to you, there are certainly much better options out there.
Conclusion
If you’ve read this review all the way to this point, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that I decided to sell the Nikon D500. While I still think it’s a great camera, and one that certainly makes sense in Nikon’s camera lineup, it just didn’t tick enough boxes for me, personally. Instead, I decided to pick up a Fujifilm X-T3 as my carry-everywhere camera. Smaller size, lighter, better lens options as well as vastly better video functionality being the main reasons. That camera will be the subject of a later review on this site.
But, I do really miss the handling and the feeling of the D500, despite not being the right camera for me, it sure had its own set of merits. A camera that handles like that, but in a mirrorless format and with a full-size sensor, would be close to my ideal camera. Dare I hope for something like that in the next generation of the Z series cameras..?
All the photos in this review were shot with the Nikon D500. The lenses used was the Tamron 10-24/3,5-4,5 VC G2, Nikon 55-200/4-5,6 VR II as well as the full-frame Nikon 85/1.8G. All of those lenses performed admirably, and are capable of producing sharp results on most settings on the 21-megapixel sensor of the Nikon D500.
If this review was helpful to you, please consider supporting me by purchasing the Nikon D500, Or any other equipment, on Amazon by using this link. The price will be the same to you, but I will get a small commision from your purchase. Thank you!
