Re: [Digital BW] Anybody using the Nikon D100 yet?
2002-07-28 by Kip Babington
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:
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> 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!