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Easy ISO Adjustment with the Nikon D7000

December 31st, 2010 1 comment

Warning: Camera nerd talk follows.  You’ve been warned. 🙂

I’ve been playing around lately with the Show ISO/Easy ISO adjustment feature of the Nikon D7000 (menu feature A3), and I have to say I love it.  In a nutshell, the setting changes the camera’s behavior to:

  1. Display the ISO setting in place of the shots remaining (on both the top LCD panel and in the viewfinder) whenever the meter is active
  2. Allow the ISO to be changed without pushing any other buttons when in Program, Shutter priority, or Aperture Priority shooting modes.
  3. The number of shots remaining can be found by either turning off the camera (where it is displayed on the top LCD), letting the meter turn off, or by turning on the INFO display.

For me, this setting overcomes two of the issues I’ve had with the Nikon user interface in the past, namely that you have to press the oddly placed ISO button to change or display the current ISO setting.  Given that ISO is so much more important to any given shot than the number of shots remaining, I find that having this information readily available very useful.

The main downsides I’ve found with the Easy ISO setting are that:

  1. The ISO setting can get changed if the controls get bumped.  But this isn’t any worse than the shutter or aperture settings, which can get changed by bumping the controls, too.
  2. It’s sometimes difficult to remember which dial controls what.  That’s because the ISO adjustment dial changes places depending on what mode you’re in:
    • In Program (P) and Shutter priority (S) modes, the front dial controls the ISO
    • In Aperture priority (A) modes, the rear dial controls the ISO
    • In Manual (M) mode, you still need to manage the ISO setting with the ISO button

Fortunately, the logic here isn’t too hard to follow: The ISO control piggybacks on the control dial that isn’t otherwise used. (In Manual they’re both used, so there’s no place to put ISO, thus it reverts.)

On the whole, I’ve found that the benefits outweigh the downsides, so I’m a happy camper.  It’s definitely nice to be able to control the camera’s interface to this level, and nice that Nikon’s engineers seem to have spent a good bit of time thinking out how this would all work.

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