Digital BW, The Print

I've had one for about 3 weeks and am loving it (after 30 years of film 
Nikons from F to F3 to F100.)  There is an extensive review at 
www.dpreview.com if you're not familiar with all the little details. 
The camera is doing what I got it for - capturing my daughter on a horse 
in midair over a jump, something none of the lesser(non-SLR) digital 
cameras I've seen could do.  It also does a wonderful job in all the 
other   The D100 seems just a responsive as my F100 in actual use - turn 
on is instantaneous, shutter response is near instantaneous, and the 
buffer is big enough that I've never had to wait for an image to be 
transferred to the card before taking the next one.

Before I got it I hadn't thought about how liberating it is not to have 
to rewind and reload film every 36 shots.  But now I no longer face the 
dilemma of to-reload-or-not when the film counter reads 24 and my 
daughter is about to enter the ring for a 10 jump round and, if she 
makes it over all jumps cleanly, will stay in the ring and start a 6 
jump jumpoff round before I could rewind and reload.  If I reload I 
waste 12 frames of film, but if I don't and she makes the jumpoff I 
won't have enough film to capture each jump.  With the D100 I don't even 
think about it - I just keep shooting.  (Along this line, battery life 
seems to be exceptional - I've not come close to exhausting a battery in 
the course of a day's shooting, although I don't do much image viewing 
while I'm shooting which probably saves a lot of power.)

I do have a 10 GB ImageBank, basically a battery powered hard drive with 
slots for CF and SM cards.  Stick a card in and press the button and it 
downloads the images from the card to the disk, so you can wipe the card 
  and go back to work.  Later you dump the Image Bank to your computer 
via USB cable.  There's always a break in the action somewhere that 
allows time to transfer things to the Image Bank, and a small second CF 
card will keep me going for a while if things pick up before the image 
transfer from the main card is complete.  I have the D100 set to number 
frames sequentially, so even if I swap cards several times throughout 
the day the images will all be in sequence when they're dumped into a 
single folder on the computer.

I posted a comment last week about my sterling results producing a B&W 
print of a D100 image using a Canon S9000 printer with its standard (6) 
inks.  As I said there, it was as fine an image as I've ever made in my 
darkroom, and far better than most.  Just for fun, the other day I blew 
the image up to 13x19, the largest size the printer will do, then took a 
7.5 x 9.5 chunk out of the middle of it (I don't have any large inkjet 
paper on hand, but plan to remedy that tomorrow) and printed the result 
- again just sent it to the printer using its high quality settings.  I 
am even more blown away by the quality with this larger print, and 
cannot imagine that I could have done as well with film.

As to old manual focus lenses, they will fit, but can be used only in 
manual exposure mode.  You do get focus confirmation, but no other 
automation.  The instruction manual talks about "CPU lenses" which 
reminds me that there is a fellow who will add a CPU chip to some AI and 
AIS lenses (not all of them have room to fit a chip in, apparently) and 
as I recall the charge was under $100, so if you have a favorite old 
lens that you don't need autofocus for, it might be worth having it 
"chipped" rather than replace it with a new AF model.

The feature I would most hope for on the next generation of Nikon D-SLR 
is a full frame sensor, so that my wide angle lenses will give the wide 
image I paid for.  On the telephoto end, my 80-200 becomes the 
equivalent of a 120-300, which is fine for most situations.  But on the 
wide end, at the moment the widest lens I have is a 20-35 zoom, which on 
the D100 is equivalent to a 30-52 or so on a film camera.  To get the 
equivalent of 20mm coverage on the D100 I will need a 14mm lens, and 
they ain't cheap.  So my hopes are for the D-2/D-200 (when they come 
out) to have a full frame chip.  If I start saving now I might even be 
able to afford one when it's finally available.  ;-)

You do have to think differently about organization and storage of 
images in digital form, but there are lots of software options out there 
to accomplish these tasks.  It's the thinking differently that takes a 
bit of adjustment, but after a couple of months in the digital world I 
think I've got a handle on this aspect of the process.

On the whole, I will not be surprised if I go from shooting 200 rolls of 
film a year to 10 or less, with the rest of my photography being done 
digitally.  I still have much to learn about using Photoshop, but have 
learned enough in 3 months to get decent glossy B&W results without 
having to spend a lot of time on each image.

Hope this helps.  I don't know what the D-100 availability is at the 
moment - my store got about 10 in at once and all had been sold in 
advance (I think I got the first one) and I think the next 10 they get 
are also spoken for.  But at least they are being shipped.

Cheers,
Kip


Tony Parker wrote:

> Anybody using the Nikon D100 yet?
> Reviews? Comments?
> Can I use my trusty old Nikon glass on the D100 body?
> Am seriously thinking about giving it a go!