Although I love shooting with the D810, I was really excited when I received a D750 to review from my friends at Hunts Photo. For a while now, theres been a gap in Nikons professional full-frame lineup. Common shooters wanting full frame could easily step up to a D610, but it wasn’t a truly professional body. Next was Nikons D810 which brings extra megapixels for portrait and landscape work, with the lack of speed at only 3.5 frame per second. Lastly, Nikons flagship D4s tops the lineup at almost $6000 bringing all the professional features with incredible lowlight performance and 11 frames per second frame rate.

Enter the D750, Nikons newest full-frame camera hoping to bridge the gap. At 24.3 megapixels, the D750 has a similar sensor to the 610, though newly designed. After shooting with it for a few days, here are my first impressions.

Ive been waiting for Wifi to come built-in to a Nikon DSLR for a while and its finally here with the D750. Connecting is easy using Nikons utility app on your smart device and it quickly syncs the photos you choose to send. To conserve battery life, Wifi is disabled when you shut off your camera and stays off until you enable it again.

Unlike the D810 and D4s, Nikon placed a mode dial on the top left of the camera. It locks in position, which is great for bouncing the camera around and making sure youre still in the same mode. However, Its tough for me to quickly change modes with one hand because of the lock. I much prefer the mode button on the D810.

Nikon made the grip handle smaller due to a change in battery location. Instead of the battery filling the handgrip, they rotated it. Although its tighter, the grip still feels pretty solid in my hands.

I love that the D750 continues to use the EN-EL15 batteries, which now work with my D7000 and D810, along with the D7100, D600, D610, and D800. They seem to last a long time and charge up quickly.

The 3.2 LCD screen is beautiful. Its bright and has a nice contrast. For the first time ever on a full-frame camera, Nikon incorporated a tilting LCD screen. This has been a real treat for shooting video, letting me pull the screen out out and tilt it up or down 90 degrees.

Something new I noticed in the menus are storing autofocus points by orientation. When shooting people, I like to shoot both vertically and horizontally to give me options in post production. Storing autofocus points lets me quickly change orientation without having to move the autofocus points each time.

Nikon shrunk the top LCD screen, taking away options like Image Size/Quality and White Balance. Instead, theyre triggering menus on the back LCD of the camera, showing more options and configurations. Ive been so used to seeing these on the top LCD that this seems very consumer and similar to what Canon users do on their cameras. It may not be a big thing, but I think its quicker and easier to look on the top LCD rather than tip the camera and see the back menu. The ISO is still displayed on both the top LCD and in the viewfinder.

The info panel on the back LCD has changed a bit from the traditional blue and grey to black and white. Again, it reminds me of the Canon menu system.

Continuing the trend with photo and video in DSLRs, the Nikon D750 is capable of 1080p 60fps. There are two shooting menu setting banks: one for shooting stills and one for shooting video. Even better, you can choose separate Picture Styles in each menu. So while I might want my JPEG stills to be processed as Standard or Vivid, I want my video to be Flat so its easy to color grade when editing. Now I don’t have to remember to change it every time I pick up the camera. If youre worried that you might change your stills Picture Style and forget to change the video one, you can link them both to whatever setting you have for stills.

When shooting between stills and video, the D750 keeps separate exposure/white balance/ISO settings, which Im not sure that I like. The D810 does it as well, but I find myself trying to switch between modes and then having to re-adjust those settings each time. Its probably not as much of a problem in studio environments, but when Im shooting quickly between locations, its a small hassle.

Buried in both the stills and video shooting menus are two time-lapse modes. For stills, Nikon continues to offer a built-in intervalometer that has been upgraded to shoot 9999 images in succession. For video, Nikon now offers a mode for Time-lapse Photography. Set up similar to the stills intervalometer screen, Nikon will compile all these stills into a single finalized movie.

Lastly, HDR is a big feature in the D750, sporting AEB up to 9 frames for bracketing HDR. Theres also a built-in HDR mode, combining two JPEG exposures into one HDR image. The only downside is this only works with JPEG images, not Raw.

Overall, Im pretty impressed with this camera. While I don’t see it as a D700 replacement, Im still unsure of who this camera is geared towards. Its got some pretty cool features, like Wifi and an tilting LCD screen, which make this camera a solid upgrade.