Nikon D600 review review: Great full-frame camera on the (sorta) cheap

Inexpensive -- well, it's all relative -- smartly designed, fast, and with generally excellent photo quality, the Nikon D600 lives up to the buzz it generated from its first days as a baby rumor.

8.3

Nikon D600 review

$1,424 at Walmart

The Good

There's a lot to like in the <b>Nikon D600</b>, including a great set of shooting features, comfortable and intelligent design, and excellent photo quality and performance.

The Bad

Photos display some unrecoverable clipping in the highlights that you don't expect in a camera of its caliber.

The Bottom Line

The Nikon D600 is a really good camera for the money, as long as you're willing to shell out for the lenses that can do it justice.

Image quality
With one disappointing exception, the D600 delivers terrific photo quality for the price. It produces relatively clean image data at low and midrange ISO sensitivities, and has very smart JPEG and noise-reduction algorithms. You get very clean JPEGs up through ISO 400. I start to see a little degradation in shadow areas at ISO 800, though there's no corresponding degradation in well-lit areas until about ISO 3200. JPEG images are generally quite usable through ISO 1600; depending upon the scene and lighting you can probably push it as high as ISO 6400, though I'd recommend working with raw to be on the safe side. I was a bit surprised that it wasn't significantly better than the Canon EOS 5D Mark II at ISO 12800, but the D600 does have less clipping in the shadows and I couldn't find any hot pixels.

Nikon D600 photo samples

+16 More

See all photos

Like most full-frame cameras, the D600 produces photos with a nice, natural sharpness and tonality. It renders a broad dynamic range, although disappointingly there's a lot less recoverable detail in clipped highlights,even in 14-bit raw files, than with more expensive models like the 5D Mark III and D800 (it will be interesting to see how the Canon EOS 6D fares under similar circumstances). The D600 does very well with shadow detail, however.

As with many of the current Nikon models, the color differences between the Standard and Neutral Picture Control color settings are relatively minimal, but the Standard seems to push the contrast a bit. That might be an issue when shooting high-key images because of the aforementioned clipping problem with highlights. Saturated reds and pinks also display a little contouring in the JPEGs -- they're actually pretty good -- but the data is there in the raws to pull back the detail.

Click to download	ISO 200	ISO 1600	ISO 6400

Overall, the colors look bright, saturated, and appealing. I found the automatic white balance just a little too cool outdoors, but the sunlight these days is starting to cool as well (and using the Keep Warm Lighting setting in the white balance doesn't help if there's no warm light). Of course, you can tune that to your taste here as you can with almost every other camera these days.

In good light, the video looks fine: reasonably sharp and well-exposed with relatively few artifacts. In low light and darkness it displays a lot of color noise and loses quite a bit of dynamic range compared with much more expensive models as well as the less-expensive Canon EOS Rebel T4i.

Performance
Note: We recently updated our testing methodology to provide slightly more real-world performance, so the results aren't necessarily comparable with previous testing. Until we're finished refining our procedures we will not be posting comparative performance charts.

I found the D600 fast enough to handle anything I threw at it. It takes about 0.4 second to power on, focus, and shoot. In good light it takes about 0.5 second to adjust exposure, focus, and shoot, which rises to about 0.6 second in dim light. (These times are slower than our previous methodology would have delivered because it did not take into account exposure.) JPEG and raw photos each take around 0.2 second from one shot to the next, which increases to 0.6 second with flash. In practice, however, focusing and shooting usually felt close enough to instantaneous. One exception is the processing of raw+JPEG shots, which occasionally held me up on reviewing images right after shooting. Live View autofocus is pretty typical for a dSLR: a bit cumbersome and slow.

Continuous shooting runs about 5.5 frames per second for either JPEG or raw, but when a raw burst hits 16 frames the buffer fills and it slows to 4.6fps (with a SanDisk Extreme Pro 95MB/sec SDXC card). I did find that using the 39-point AF tended to slow it a bit as well, with hit-or-miss accuracy. One not-uncommon annoyance is that in the multipoint tracking AF modes it doesn't show you what it's locked on, so it's impossible to tell in advance if it's working correctly. Single-point AF works pretty quickly and accurately; I found the slowish movement of the lens barrel of the 24-85mm lens to be the performance bottleneck instead.

While battery life is rated competitively for this class, I did want to offer one warning: despite supporting the Eye-Fi API in-camera, the card definitely drains quite a bit of battery. And the LCD definitely requires some shading and magnification via a loupe for shooting video, if not for basic Live View operation.

Design and features
Given that the D600 is based on the D7000, which I think is still one of the best-designed Nikon dSLRs, it should be unsurprising that I really like this model's design and operation; I really enjoy shooting with it. It's a little bit lighter than other full-frame bodies -- but not significantly so -- except for its newest competitors. It's got a similar build quality, constructed from a magnesium-alloy chassis covered in polycarbonate, with moderate dust-and-weather sealing.

On the camera's left shoulder sits the exposure mode dial, on top of the release mode dial (which is how Nikon refers to its drive modes); the former has a lock button in the center and the latter has it adjacent. As with Canon's design, I don't really like the lock button in the center, as I find it a little awkward to operate single-handed that way. There are two user settings slots on the mode dial; that's one way in which the D600 differs from the pro bodies, which have a much more sophisticated (and complex) set of options. I happen to like them better on the mode dial, but I also find that three slots is my optimal number of custom sets.

On the right shoulder sit the status LCD, dedicated metering and exposure compensation buttons, the power switch circumscribing the shutter button, and a tiny video record button. I'm not a big fan of the tiny top record buttons that seem to be becoming the vogue, and am a little disappointed that you can't program one of the buttons on the back for this function.

As with other modern Nikon models, there are two programmable buttons to the right side of the lens; to the left side are the flash popup/flash compensation button, bracketing control, and focus mode switch plus focus area button. One capability I wish both Nikon and Canon would incorporate would be selecting groups of focus points, like you can with the Sony Alpha SLT-A77 and Olympus' old dSLRs.

It's notable that even though Canon dropped the column of buttons to the left of a smaller LCD on the 6D, the D600, which retains them, still manages to be narrower than the 6D. Menu, Picture Controls, white balance, quality, and ISO sensitivity line the left side. You operate the Live View/Movie switch and the focus-point-selector rocker with your right thumb.

The viewfinder is really nice, big and bright with the useful overlay grid that many of Nikon's dSLRs have. You can assign one of the buttons to activate a digital level in the viewfinder that uses the exposure bars, which I like, but I wish it didn't have to toggle between that and the typical exposure information, and that there were a vertical indicator as well for front-back tilt.

Although it's missing desirable features like built-in Wi-Fi and GPS, the D600 has a full complement of shooting options. Unlike the 6D it has a built-in flash; while I don't recommend using on-camera flash, it's useful in a pinch and it enables in-camera wireless flash operation. The D600 also gets props for dual SD card slots and a headphone jack, other features the 6D disappointingly lacks. And it retains Nikon staples like time-lapse shooting and an intervalometer, plus the clean and uncompressed HDMI output first offered by the D800. For some, however, the biggest advantage the D600 immediately offers over the 6D is the ability to use all variations of both DX (with APS-C cropping, of course) and FX lenses.

It's interesting to see where companies draw the line on features. For instance, as mentioned before Nikon only supplies two custom settings slots, and you can't save them to an SD card for sharing across bodies (though you can save and share Picture Controls). It's also limited to a three-shot/3EV bracket, though that might be wise given the highlight clipping. It uses the same, somewhat limited two-exposure sans raw HDR as in the D4.

Those are just the highlights. For a complete description of the D600's features and operation, you can download the PDF manual.

Conclusion
The Nikon D600 is essentially the D7000 with a full-frame sensor and some more modern video capabilities. That's what you're paying all the extra bucks for. Whether it's worth it for you depends upon what you photograph. If you primarily shoot telephoto, for example, the D7000's focal-length magnifier of 1.5x means you can use a shorter -- and generally lighter -- lens to achieve the same framing. The D600 does support DX lenses and will automatically frame to APS-C, so you don't lose any of that flexibility, but if you're never going to take advantage of the wider angle of view or use fast lenses, then you're better off sticking with the cheaper D7000 and spending the extra $1,000 on a nice lens. Another consideration, however, is that the D7000 is due for replacement -- if Nikon chooses to replace it at all.

The D600 definitely feels like a must-have upgrade over the D700, if not for the resolution than for the generations-improved image-processing, better performance, and bigger viewfinder and LCD. And video, of course. As the D600 is a vastly less expensive alternative to the D800, that choice is a little tougher. The D800 has a broader dynamic range, better AF system, and more durable build, but whether or not those are meaningful tradeoffs depends again on what you photograph. Though the 5D Mark II is old and has a lot of issues, like a sad AF system (and being discontinued), it still does a better job of holding highlights. I'm hoping that's a firmware-fixable update. As for a comparison with the 6D, that will have to wait until I get my hands on one.