Tested – The Nikon D6

Ask Clive himself what he feels is one of the most useful features of the new camera, however, and he very quickly picks out the new AWB algorithm, which has been set up to deliver much more accurate colours and clearer skin tones. It’s not one of the stand out features that’s been especially highlighted in reviews so far, but to the professional it has the potential to make a big difference to the work being outputted.

“The fact is that, when you’re a working sports or news photographer, you’re inevitably shooting in JPEG,” says Clive. “That’s because you need the smaller files for transmitting and storage reasons, and there’s only a small amount of post you can carry out on a file from an ethical perspective if you’re a press photographer in any case. What this means is that your capacity to carry out a lot of work on your file is limited and so it’s really important that what comes out of the camera is close to what you want to be sending over.

“I’ve found that the white balance on the D6 with the new algorithm is so much more accurate and that’s been a huge help. I was shooting with the camera around the time of the early morning sunrise when there were some lovely warm colours around and these were all rendered exactly as I saw them, rather than there being any cold casts. In my experience so far the AWB seems to be almost foolproof, which is something I’m really happy about.”

Other upgrades from the D5 include the provision of two CF Express XQD card slots – required to handle some of the vast amounts of data the D6 is capable of generating – previously you could buy versions of the camera that either came with dual XQD or CF cards – a much longer maximum exposure time of 900 seconds up from 30 seconds, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi to enable images to be transferred to a mobile device if required and a maximum video recording time of 105 minutes, up from 29 minutes and 59 seconds.

More information:
www.nikon.co.uk

All images: Clive Mason/Getty Images