Ask Matthew...
Our resident Nikon expert Matthew Richards answers your questions and solves your problems. If you have a Nikon-related question, email it to mail@nphotomag.com
QI’m looking to upgrade my D3400, which I use with the kit zoom lenses and a 50mm mostly for travel and for family portraits. What would you recommend?
Andy Willows
AFor the sake of retaining a compact and lightweight kit, suitable for travel photography, you could hang onto your lenses and go for a replacement D5600 body, although new stock is running out. It’s a better quality DSLR but still quite small and has the additional benefit of a vari-angle touchscreen.
Personally, I’d trade in the D3400 and all of the lenses, and upgrade to a mirrorless Z 50 kit with Z 16-50mm and
Z 50-250mm lenses, which costs around £1259/$1247. I’d add the DX format Viltrox AF 56mm f/1.4 Z for portraiture, which retails for around £289/$279. If you’d prefer a more retro-style camera, the Z fc is also fabulous. I have a Z fc and all of the above lenses, and absolutely love them as a high-performance, lightweight camera kit.
QI’m thinking of buying a Z 6II but understand it supports two different types of memory card. Which would you buy for performance and value for money?
Michael Jack
AI don’t tend to buy XQD or Cfexpress cards as they’re so expensive. I use Lexar Professional 1667x SDXC UHS-II cards, which take advantage of the camera’s faster UHS-II data transfer bus, delivering very fast write speeds and read speeds of up to 120MB/S and 250MB/S respectively. They’re much more affordable, the 128GB edition costing around £37/$37.
To take full advantage of the extra speed when downloading files to a computer, you’d also need a UHS-II card reader. I use the Sandisk Extreme PRO SD UHS-II card reader (£20/$20), which is available in USB-A and USB-C options. That said, if you’re downloading files to a computer with a hard disk rather than a solid state drive, download speed will be rather slower, due to the write speed of the hard disk.
QI have a Nikon AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6e ED VR lens, can I use a teleconverter with it for extra reach? Would that work as a solution?
Ron Tate
AThe quick answer is ‘yes and no’. You can mount the AF-S 200-500mm to a DSLR via any of Nikon’s TC-14E II, TC-14E III, TC-17E II, TC-20E II and TC-20E III teleconverters, but autofocus may be impossible in viewfinderbased shooting. Using a 1.4x teleconverter, the widest effective aperture shrinks by one f/stop to f/8, so autofocus is only available with DSLRS that have f/8 sensitivity in their autofocus systems. These include the D5, D500, D4/D4S, Df, D850, D810/D810A, D800/D800E, D750, D600/D610, D7100, D7200 and D7500.
With a 1.7x or 2.0x teleconverter, the widest effective aperture shrinks by 1.5 or two f/stops respectively, to either f/9.5 or f/11, theoretically making autofocus impossible using the viewfinder-based autofocus module of any DSLR. But, it would work with a Z-system mirrorless camera via an FTZ or FTZ II mount adapter.
QI am fed up with constantly changing cartridges in my printer. Can you recommend an alternative for printing photos up to A4 in size? Jane Hamlin
AIt sounds like you’re printing quite a high volume of photo prints, if you need to keep replacing the cartridges. I would recommend the Canon MAXIFY G650 printer. It’s more expensive to buy than cartridge-based printers, at around £255 (sold as the G620 at $329 in the USA) but is based on six ‘Megatanks’ of dye-based inks, which are replenished with bottles rather than cartridges.
It can work out massively cheaper, as the printer comes with a full set of bottles, which lasts for around 3800 6x4-inch photos, and replacement ink is very much cheaper to buy. The printer has a built-in scanner that also supports standalone copying, and can be connected via USB or a Wi-fi network. Look out for next issue’s Big Test, in which we’ll be comparing the best current photo printers of all shapes and sizes.