Nikon’s D5100, D3100 and D7000 all come with their own video time limits that keep them well below the 30 minute mark necessary to keep from being classified as “video cameras.” That’s because, as we’ve mentioned in the past, video cameras are charged a 5.6 percent duty that the manufacturers would like to avoid.

The D5100, for example, will stop you from recording once you’ve hit 20 minutes or 4GB, whichever comes first. In all honesty, most videographers won’t see a need to record videos any longer than this, but if you do, the Nikon Hackers have released a hack that removes this time limit from the D5100, D3100 and D7000. Read more…

Nikon’s firmware got decrypted last month, and now an unofficial firmware for Nikon DSLRs has emerged. Rather than offer useful adjustments, the firmware is purely for geekiness: it gives Nikon D5100 DSLRs a Star Wars theme.
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Nikon is running a new “Man of Action” commercial starring Ashton Kutcher in the US that features the same “twist” as the Olympus PEN commercial we shared in the middle of 2010. Sorry for the out-of-sync audio (let’s just pretend it’s dubbed).

If you’ve ever wanted to know what the guts of a Nikon D5100 look like, iFixit just published a meticulously documented teardown of the camera. Aside from pointing out the various parts found in the body, an interesting conclusion the iFixit team came to was that the D5100 has a horrible “Repairability Score” of 2/10, where 10 is easiest to repair. The reason? “Approximately 4 billion screws hold the device together” (They’re exaggerating, of course).
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Nikon officially announced their new D5100 DSLR today, replacing the D5000 in the entry-level category. The 16.2 megapixel camera with a 1.5x crop factor has a 3-inch swiveling LCD screen, 4fps continuous shooting, an ISO range from 100 to 6400 (which you can boost to 25600), 1080p video recording at 30fps, and built in sensor cleaning.
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