D7100

I've been waiting patiently for the D400 as a proper upgrade to D300/s since it's getting a bit long in the tooth but there seems to be no action on Nikon's part regarding this phantom body.
Notice Nikon is calling the D7100 their "DX flagship" model which leads me to believe there will be no D400 in the near future, alas but the D7100 has 24+ MP.

So i bit the bullet, took the plunge, and caved in.
I got the bright idea of trading in my two spare D300 bodies in to my local Kerrisdale cameras towards a new D7100 body, which had only just come down in price to $1000. They valued the used bodies at $225 each, shutter counts were 100,000 on the older body and only 65,000 on the newer one. Will keep my D300s as a spare just in case the D7100 doesn't work out for whatever reason.
Picked up a Nikon battery grip, 2 SD cards, 2 extra batteries ($100 each, ouch!, don't remember Nikon batteries costing that much before) and the body and now i can't wait to take it out for a first test on the 500f4, with and without 1.4x tele.

Well, close to 1000 shots now and i'm getting a better picture of the camera's capabilities.
the small buffer is noticeable as i found yesterday but it just means being a bit more conservative when firing off to give the buffer time, one good thing is that it's pretty fast at processing so wait time is not too long when in the thick of action.
It's sharp, maybe getting rid of the low-pass filter has something to do with it.
It handles the 500 f4 aptly and finds focus quickly.

I've switched the 1.3 crop factor off for now but may consider it again in the future as it makes for a quicker and smaller-sized image when uploading, i never thought that it would magnify my images in a useful manner, rather it would crop out the "unwanted" parts of the image that i would crop out anyways.
When shooting the oystercatchers in close i forgot to pay attention to the 1.3 crop markers set in from the regular viewfinder markers and found a lot of shots with cropped feet because of it.

I will have to do something as the Adobe DNG Converter seems to overheat my computer when processing RAW files to the extent that my computer shuts down unexpectedly, not cool.
I also don't have to worry anymore about letting my monitor warm up before working on images because it takes so darned long to convert  :lol: 

It's all good though, happy with the image quality so far.