Just for the heck of it I've been doing a little informal study of several Internet forums. According to my latest weekly statistics, the D7000 now overexposes 78% less than it did two months ago, back focuses 70% less, and hot pixels are down an amazing 85%.
Say what?
It happens with virtually every new product release. A huge rash of complaints come almost immediately upon those first users receiving their cameras. Everyone rushes out and does random tests without first fully understanding the product, and they post "my D7000 overexposes" or "I see hot pixels" when they encounter something they don't understand or didn't expect. Hidden within all these complaints sometimes is a real issue (the P5000's tendency to punt on focus and put up a Lens Initialization error in some situations, or the hot pixels in D7000 video, for instance, both of which we have "firmware fixes" for already).
In the interest of getting those complaints down to 0% here are the real answers:
- D7000 Overexposes. I haven't yet found one that does. Indeed, install a UniWB on the D7000 and you might decide the D7000 underexposes. The default camera settings set a very bright gamma, use high contrast settings, the camera has a too-bright LCD, and the metering isn't as aggressive in bringing down highlight detail in high contrast scenes like older Nikons. But the camera does not overexpose. Users overexpose.
- Hot Pixels are a Problem on the D7000. Not on any I've tested. At exposures longer than a 1/15 of a second and shorter than one second at high ISO values, the D7000 often will produce some minor hot pixels, especially when hot. But when I ask people to provide me with an image that produced hot pixels for them, I mostly get ISO 6400, 1/2 second exposures at f/11 of a lens cap. Not a common photo situation (even without the lens cap: why would you be at f/11 and 1/2 second at ISO 6400?). As I write in my review, the D7000 is sort of mid-pack in Nikon cameras as regards hot pixels. Not the best, not the worst.
- The D7000 Back Focuses (or Front Focuses). This is the trickiest complaint to track down. All modern AF systems have tolerance built into them, so getting dead on repeatable results is tough to do in the first place. But more often than not I see mistaken assumptions in the testing that produces such complaints. The D7000's AF sensors, for example, are larger than any previous Nikon (the 4800 in the CAM4800 part number refers to the sensing area of the detectors, which is higher than that of the CAM3500 on the D3s, D3x, D300s). Unless your test focus point is on a flat surface that is equidistant from the camera across the area of the focus acquisition, you can get misleading results.
Meanwhile, things that maybe we should be discussing aren't getting much attention: much tighter cut off of near IR, changes in the red/blue channel balances, and more. Of course, those aren't "problems" either; those are just things you need to know to understand how the D7000 is rendering a scene, and you'd only need to know those things if you've gotten the exposure and focus right ;~).
So, as we head into the heart of winter and the wild and random first reaction posts all disappear from sight on the Internet fora, let's just all go out and take pictures with the camera, shall we?