Thanks for the review, I am in some ways as anoyed as you about Nikon having all the tech but not using it to the fullest. I have been saying it for ages, if they want to make a splash in video world, they should do some revolutionary steps like at least internal 10 bit high bitrate or even raw nowadays. But credit should be given to them where it is due. I think that Nikon thought that giving uncompressed hdmi out 2 years ago would have done the trick, but unfortunately they could not guest that, most other manufacturer would follow rapidly and that Blackmagic and ML would follow. Taking them outside of the highlight. But in the mean time they have been constantly updating there camera to sampling more pixel and downscaling to get rid of moire/aliasing and giving very good low light and now adding 60fps at 1080p. More so that they are implementing those tech in there entry level camera first, not afraid to cannibalize there higher end camera at least in the video side. That is why you find yourself in the situation as you mentioned in your article that the low end camera is better than the higher end one. Would you have preferred that they keep that tech until they update the D4, D800, D600 and D7100. They are actually updating their camera line with the expeed 4 and a new D4s has been announced and we can expect a D7200 in the near future. The only problem is the Sony based Sensor D800 and D610 which might only do line skipping and that is perhaps why Nikon has been abandoning Sony sensors.
You have also been comparing the D5300 against a plethora of other cameras and each of them with their fort. The D5300 does not beat any of them at one thing but it might be todays most balance camera in the DSLR world. It might not match the 13 stop of DR of the pocket, But it matches by your say in Proress mode and so should be 1 to 1.5 stop better than the Canons. But it has a Cine 35 mm sensor, no ugly moire/aliasing and will surely beat it in low light and you can do good slow motion. You could even add an external recorder to get high bitrate. Talking about external recorder, I have a Ninja with my D7100 and it really completes the Nikons, apart from the obvious high bitrate, you get peaking, false colour, zebras, sound monitoring in a very compact package.
I think the d7200 will be the Nikon camera to get shortly for photo/video hybrid Nikon users. The body will be much better in terms of button and construction. I don't know why the D5200/D5300 (perhaps Nikon doin it deliberately to differentiate camera), But the D7100 is nearly as sharp as a gh2. With a Ninja it is even sharper. My guess is that a D7200 would be very very close to a Canon C100 and have equal functionality with a Ninja with the added bonus of 60p for 1/3 the price.
Again I would have liked Nikon to be bolder, but this camera might not be better than any other camera in any specific domain, but it is good to very good in nearly every aspect of a camera. It would have been very nice to see it on one of your chart/scene to be able to compare it with the other cameras.
SaintQuest got a reaction from Cfreak in Video quality charts - February 2014