When getting images to an editor during events that garner a lot of news coverage its not fast enough to finish shooting and courier off the media card.

Nikon’s Electronic Virtual Horizon feature quickly and accurately displays a graphic to show the camera’s position relative to the horizontal plane.

Active D-Lighting optimizes high contrast images to restore the shadow and highlight details that are often lost when strong lighting increases the contrast between bright and dark areas of an image.

Nikon’s new D4 D-SLR is unique in that it is the first Nikon D-SLR to separate flash exposure compensation from the camera’s exposure compensation when using the camera with compatible Nikon Speedlights in i-TTL.

Matrix metering evaluates multiple segments of a scene to determine the best exposure by essentially splitting the scene into sections, evaluating either 420-segments or 1,005 segments, depending on the Nikon D-SLR in use.

Select Nikon digital SLR cameras feature special effects that can be used when recording still images or D-movies. For example, on the D5100, they can be found by selecting Effects on the camera's mode dial, and scrolling through the various effects via the command dial. You can preview which effect will be used when the camera's menu is set for the Classic or Graphic mode or when the D5100 is set for Live View operation. These special Effects work with JPEG files (if JPEG + NEF is chosen; or NEF however, only JPEG files are recorded).

Exclusive to Nikon cameras, the NEF is Nikon's RAW file format. RAW image files, sometimes referred to as digital negatives, contain all the image information captured by the camera's sensor, along with the image's metadata (the camera's identification and its settings, the lens used and other information). The NEF file is written to the memory card in either an uncompressed or "lossless" compressed form.

ISO originally referred to the sensitivity of film—it's "light gathering" ability. The higher the ISO rating, the greater the film's ability to capture images taken in low light. High ISO film was called fast film—it required a shorter exposure than a low ISO film. For digital photography, ISO refers to the sensitivity—the signal gain—of the camera's sensor.

The 51-point AF system positions 51 points of focus within the frame to allow photographers to choose a variety of focus configurations to suit the shooting situation.