First impressions are that the D4 is fantastic, like really technically fantastic. The price bothers me a bit, as you're getting into the price range where hybrid starts to make less sense, and you want something more dedicated to the job. Seems an odd market they're trying to corner.

Well if you call pro photographers an odd market :)

There is nothing odd about it at all. They are making a camera that will work for high end sports shooters, the sort of people that pay to have their D3 sent off to Nikon to have the buffer doubled. Now the D4 has an absurd buffer, almost 70 shots of uncompressed 14bit while shooting at 10 or 11 fps. Maybe they aren't trying to corner the market so much as not let it slip away to Canon, I know people that primarily shoot stills that have gone with Canon because they might want to shoot video and are glad to have that option even though they don't really need it for their work.

I am mostly impressed with everything I've seen on the D4 so far. As a D3 owner I'd be tempted to upgrade if real tests backup the claimed improvements over the D3s - 1 stop, which was already shown to be about 1 stop better than the original D3. I'd love to have video on my D3 body that was decent, it's hard to tell at the moment whether it'll be up to folks standards around here who have gotten used to the GHx with and without hacks.

One thing I have read that I didn't like on dpreview's overview is that even the FX mode of video is a 91% crop from actual full frame stills, which is a little bit annoying to lose the sensor space, and more crucially the framing of a full frame sensor. I wonder why they have had to do this?

@LPowell dpreview must have it wrong then, they said

"Movies can also be shot at three different crops from the sensor, which Nikon is describing as FX, DX and 2.7X (native 1920x1080). This makes it easy to vary the field-of-view for grabbing footage, even if you’ve got a prime lens mounted. However, the ‘FX’ size is a significantly cropped version of the full sensor (it’s 91% of the sensor’s width), so the field-of-view will be a little narrower than you’d expect for any given focal length. Also the native 1920x1080 video will be higher quality than the FX and DX versions, since it hasn't been downsized. This difference is likely to be incredibly small (almost certainly irrelevant for most users), but is a consideration for high-end video users."

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/7799914638/nikon-d4-overview/3

I thought I'd seen a diagram showing the crops where the usual 3:2 to 16:9 crop is happening but no cropping in the x-axis, I'll try to find that again to settle my head. Dpreview are usually pretty thorough though, and the sentence on narrower fov makes you think it's not just a case of them getting width and height mixed up for the crop axis.

Look forward to more samples, stills and videos to get more of a feel for what it's capable of.

Found a crop diagram in the official PDF here

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d4/pdf/d4_12p.pdf

It shows a slight crop horizontally but in my eyes it doesn't look big enough to be anywhere near 91% in the horizontal.

@robbie75vr had a look on dpreview at a d7000 review, it is impressively good, but in higher isos which is what I care about its not quite as good as the D3/D700 at 3200-6400+ it is impressively close mind, which I didn't expect. Certainly getting a lot of bang for buck, the dpreview concludes with saying the d7000 is the best performing APS-C camera for ISO, nice.

Sadly it'll be months after release till dpreview get the d4 available for comparisons!!

@itimjim: I understand the price, it's what one has to pay for a top-of-the-line pro dslr, I just don't know if I'm interested in a DSLR at that price. What is cool is that the 1DX and the D4 both seem to really be truly perfect hybrid cameras (sorry but the GH2s stills can't compare to Nikon's or Canon's), but at a high cost where they would make more sense with somebody primarily doing stills.

But it is a step in the right direction. Because I'm hoping Nikon will carry over features from this to their lower-end cams.

DAMN! I just realized something... What if the D4 could do a 4:3 S35 mode (as the RED Dragon sensor is supposed to be able too). Then it would kick major arse. You all know what I mean: Anamorphics...

The only unknown for me is the resolution. The rest seems to be very very good. I expect most of these will go on lower body at least to a $ 1500 D400 and a $ 2500 D701 in the near future.

@danyyyel,

I also am waiting on resolution. My thing is if the camera in FX mode is taking advantage of almost all of the 16.2 MP wouldn't the camera in DX(1.5X crop) or the 2.7X crop mode only be able to take advantage of something like 10.8 to 11MP for the DX mode and something like 6MP in the 2.7X mode.

I mean wouldn't the Rumored D800 with a rumored 36MP sensor be better with 36MP for the FX mode and something like 24MP for the DX mode and maybe some other crop mode as well?

Albeit that the D4 would be more than likely be better in the area of low light and image noise at high ISO's.

Why would anyone buy a canon C300 for 20k now?