Nikon D4S review – Metering
I used the D4S in a variety of conditions, including dawn in central London, a sunny afternoon in a country park, and a bright but overcast day at the races. In each scenario the camera’s 91,000-pixel RGB metering system worked excellently. Nikon would appear to have improved its scene-recognition technology, with the camera almost second-guessing exactly how I wanted an image to be exposed.
Shooting the horse racing, the resulting images were bright, with the highlights in the sky taken to the point of clipping, and leaving plenty of detail in the horses and foreground. However, shooting an early morning cityscape, the D4S again took the highlights to the point of clipping. This resulted in some lovely detail in the sky, with a more brooding foreground that was a little underexposed.
The balance between highlights and shadows is almost perfect, and is helped by a nice JPEG tone curve when in the standard image mode. Switching on the Active D-Lighting just helps to lift the shadows, with little risk of introducing noise.
