The camera buying guide for student journalists has been updated again – a pair of new models from Nikon have hit the market since my last post, and I’ve expanded the list of microphone recommendations. I talk about the new Nikon releases (well, one of them anyway) below.
In the future I’m hoping to get my hands on a high-end Micro Four Thirds model soon to write up a decent look at one of those for journalism. I have limited experience with the Panasonic GH2 (My former student, Amanda Douville and I put together this piece on our high school summer camp with it) but I wouldn’t feel confident enough to do a full writeup after just one small video with it, so I’m holding off until I can get a GH3-caliber camera for review. I certainly felt like the GH2 had a lot to offer to the student journalist. Panasonic, want to help me out?
D7100 released
I’m highlighting this specifically out of the camera buying guide for a couple of very big reasons. Back in the day, I had a Nikon D300s that I loved very dearly. It had a professional autofocus system trickled down from the top Nikon model of the time, the D3. Nikon repeated this with their D7100 – essentially borrowing from the D4 with its autofocus system. Likewise, they also borrowed from the playbook of their professional camera from 2005, the D2x with another feature – the ability to “crop” the sensor and add a little bit of extra zoom to your lens in the process. This also increases the cameras burst rate to 7 frames per second from its usual 6. Both of these developments bode well for sports shooters, especially.
But for the student journalist, since that’s what the guide is about, the biggest news is the headphone jack. You can now monitor your audio live in the field. Finally. As far as I know, this is the lowest-price camera on the market to offer this feature, something that is critical for video.
DSLR shooters have been making do without this feature for a while. But now we don’t have to anymore.
I’ve added the D7100, and the new D5200 to the guide.