The D5 is the ideal camera for all-day events such as weddings, where you don’t want to be worrying about swapping out batteries, or worse still, it running out completely. You can keep going for nearly 4,000 shots according to the official CIPA rating, and you may even be able to squeeze more out of it in real-world shooting conditions. One of the best features of the D5 is its fantastic battery life. On the downside, you’ll pay for this extra flexibility in size and weight - the D500 is nearly half the weight of the D5. This is great news if you’re working in the studio, shooting portraits, or perhaps at an event where you’re switching quickly between landscape and portrait format shooting. This gives you extra buttons and a joystick which come into their own when shooting portrait format images. The D500 has a standard DSLR shape, while the D5 has an inbuilt additional portrait-format grip. That makes it handy for shooting from awkward angles and is particularly favoured by videographers. However, the D500 has another ace up its sleeve as its screen tilts. If the action you’re shooting isn’t super fast, you might consider going for the smaller camera, while the D5 makes sense if you need to capture split-second moments.īoth of these cameras have touch-sensitive screens, which can be extremely useful when you’re working in Live View, or for flicking through and zooming into images in playback. The D5 offers up to 12fps shooting, while the D500 isn’t too far behind with 10fps shooting. If however, you need the ultimate in shallow depth of field control, the D5’s larger sensor is the best choice.īoth the cameras have reasonably impressive frame rates, so don’t dismiss the D500 and assume only the D5 will be good for sport photography. That can be super useful for photographing wildlife, action or sport as you can get closer to the action. Many will automatically write off anything with a smaller sensor, but there are some advantages to it.įor a start, the crop factor of having a smaller sensor means your lenses automatically become longer without having to hire or purchase additional glass.
With either of these cameras, you get 20.8-megapixels to play with, but of course, the big difference is that the D5 has a larger, full-frame sensor, while the D500’s is APS-C sized. Here we take a look at some of the key differences between the two to help you choose which would be best for your next project.
They’re both excellent cameras, but it can be difficult to know which one is the best fit for a particular job. Both the Nikon D5 and the Nikon D500 are found right at the top of Nikon’s full-frame and APS-C (respectively) line-ups.