Agree. The manuals for my D7500 consist of a 300+ page User Manual and a 200+ page Menu Guide.

In the explanations of the camera’s functions there are a lot of tables and references to other pages (basically hyperlinks) so trying to read them from cover to cover (on your computer as a pdf) you can easily get lost. “I linked to page 123 and now I don’t remember where I came form”.

They are very useful for reference but IMHO not for learning from scratch.

As I have mentioned in this forum previously I bought an online course “Quick Start D7500” from Creative Live and it covered 90% of what I needed to know. I also bought David Bush’s book on the D7500 and that has been very useful as well.

Amazon has a number of 1TB SSDs from WD, Crucial, SanDisk, Samsung. ranging from $108 to $150. They are internal SSDs. When ordering one of those also buy a Sabrent 2.5-Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool-free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized For SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP) for $8.99. It takes less than couple of minutes to install the SSD in the enclosure and you have a 1TB External SSD for well under $200.

I recently went on a 9 day tour of Costa Rica. There were 42 others on that tour. A fair number of them had DSLRs. The rest had small point and shoots.

Being a photography buff, I engaged some of those with DSLRs askng how they like their (different model) cameras, lenses, etc. and what they liked to do photography wise.

I was surprised to hear from a majority of them (this is a paraphrased summary) “Oh, I don’t do much. It sits in a drawer most of the time. I never bothered to read the manual and I’m not sure what most of the buttons do, and I don’t get very many good pictures”

That just surprised me. Spending $$ and carrying around a DSLR that you are not going to use to anywhere it’s full capability is a waste.

So I just said OK. But I would have loved to have convinced them to want to learn more and use the cameras as they were designed to be used. Didn’t want to cause problems.

Check out the Panasonic ZS-70. It's a Pro Point and Shoot. Small, compact, but a lot of DSLR features and capability. Smaller sensor, but gets great shots. 30x zoom. Not that expensive.


https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwjLlIGCyOvgAhWMnLMKHcH1BdQYABAAGgJxbg&sig=AOD64_0GkpDlSNyc0teNqmpjofQVuA17mw&q=&ved=2ahUKEwijsfuByOvgAhWLON8KHeYGBfkQ0Qx6BAgFEAE&adurl=

I have set the Image Review time to 5 seconds, and usually it does display the taken image for that duration. However sometimes after a shot the monitor only displays the taken image for less than a second, then goes black for several seconds, then shows the normal settings (aperture, ss, iso, etc.) screen you get when you depress the shutter button.

Any ideas as to why this is happening?

Wow.

So process of elimination.

What do you see with the SD card in the camera?
Have you tried taking a new shot and reviewing it in the camera?

Have you tried that SD card in a different computer? Same result?

Buy an SD card to USB adapter and try that on your computer.

Have you looked at the contacts on the SD card to see if clean and not damaged.

Have you tried a known good (from someone else or one of yours from previously) in the camera? And in your computer?

Buy a new SD card and see if it works.

Make careful notes as you go through this process (worked, didn’t work) and maybe something will jump out at you.

Keep us posted on what you find. Having been in the NAND business I interested in see if you can identify cause.

Agree and disagree. For the very artistic component of photography (composition, light, DOF, etc) an in person class is best. For some of the mechanical aspects (shooting modes, focus, iso, metering, exp comp, etc.) those are things one can asorb in an online course and then go out and experiment over and over to determine what works best and when and why.

Highly recommend Creative Live. Several courses by John Greengo on Fundamentals of Photography. Very comprehensive and detailed course. Plus excellent pdf slides of what he presents in the class. Good for future reference.

Don’t know about Canon, but on my Nikon BBF has to be explicitly set. It is a custom setting. So perhaps your resetting your settings undid BBF and it needs to configured again.

I bought a Chromebook - 11.6” w/SD card & USB ports ($200). Also a 500 GB HD. I can insert the SD card, connect the HD & copy my photos to the HD. If I have decent WiFi I can also upload to one of the cloud services (I use OneDrive).

Laptop is small and easy to take. With this scheme worst case is redundancy of SD card & HD. Best case those two plus cloud protecting me from theft as well.

Additionally having the Chromebook is nice way of previewing photos on a bigger screen than camera.

Has worked well for me.

All electronics are vulnerable to cosmic rays. HDs, SSDs, your computer, etc. But HDs additionally are mechanical and studies have shown they have a higher failure rate than SSDs. (See links below). Both HDs and SSDs have sophisticated error detection and correction algorithms built in to protect against bit errors.

The point is not to have a single point of failure. Redundancy is key. It's unlikely that your SSD (or HD) is going to suffer a failure simultaneously with Carbonite having a massive failure or going out of business. If either fails you will have time to restore from the other and again have redundancy. I do think offsite for one of the backups is important since no matter how many backups you have at home they could be subject to simultaneous failure if your home burns down or earthquake, tornado, flood, or gets robbed.

I was in the data storage business for 40+ years and have designed and managed design teams for both HDs and SSDs. I have migrated all of my storage to SSDs.

https://www.contegix.com/solid-state-disks-fail-often-hard-disks/?gclid=CjwKCAiA767jBRBqEiwAGdAOryTIhzDBj4s0uGZUrBMlcL2llgb0pvroJl2ykDhX9GXWJD3QBogXzBoCwXwQAvD_BwE

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2873551/data-center/debunking-ssd-myths.html

2TB Seagate from Amazon $60-$65. Fine for backup but cloud backup in addition recommended. What happens if Your place burns down or you are robbed and they take your drives?

At least 1 onsite backup + offsite backup is best. I have 2 backup drives. Alternate between them on the 1st and 15 th of month.

If the address on B&H website is correct then you should be able to show FedEx and ask why it went to Pittsburgh and ask what happens if it is refused. Were you home when the battery was supposedly delivered? Theft of packages left at front doors is a growing problem.

OK, I'm probably going to get some criticism for this post, but it's my belief that if you are out in the field using your camera you probably should have a pretty good knowledge of it's capabilities and workings, and not have to be referring to any manuals.

I also find my Nikon D7500 manuals not that useful for learning the camera. The manual and menu guide are 357 and 263 pages respectively. They both have a lot of good information but one has to follow a lot of manual hyperlinks as most topics have a lot of references to other pages that then also have references to other pages.

When I got my camera I took an online course from Creative Live (Fast Start D7500, taught by John Greengo) and it got me 90% of what I needed to know for most everything I want to do. I also purchased David Bush's "Nikon D7500 Digital SLR Photography" and got me to 99%. It's great because it not only explains the how but also the why for most operations. For the last 1% the manual is fine.

Agree. Smartphones have cameras (and they are getting close to DSLR capabilities). So why shouldn’t cameras have some smartphone capabilities. Don’t need to call on it or stream shows. But ability to run some photography oriented apps would be great.

I have two on my iPhone that I find useful. One is a DOF calculator. For any given aperture , focal length, and subject distance is has a graphic display of DOF range. The second app is a rangefinder. Tells me distance to subject.

I have these on my old iPhone 4. They work without any cellular plan.

Bought a mobile phone mount with an adapter to mount on camera hot shoe. Use it to help get DOF guidance. Works great.