Hi all.
I was about to purchase a Nikon D100 from my mother-in-law that works at a fairly large shop. Her boss told her that I should wait as there will be a price reduction soon after Oct. 1. If that is the case, there might be a reduction on the D2H.
D-100s are $1800 on eBay. The new D2H has a smaller maximum file size than the D-100 but shoots many more fps, a consideration if you're shooting football or soccer or flying birds.
I've had 2/3rds of a D-100 file used for the cover of a magazine recently and I'd used the fine JPEG resolution to capture the file to begin with. The Nikon lens was sharp and the image on the cover was also. A 17M file at 300dpi is about 6x10. The cover of the magazine was 8x12 and the editor only used the top 2/3rds of the digitally captured image.
Didn't seem necessary to me to acquire a larger file, and considering how slow the RAW capture or the TIFF capture is, the JPEG seemed fine too.
But that's not what the stock houses will tell you.
The standard for stock is becoming a minimum 50M file. Either you shoot film and have it scanned to that size file, or you have to upsample your digital capture, since the new Kodak digi doesn't get files that large.
I'm a Nikon shooter, I know from beans about the Canons. But I do hear often from both my NPPA list and my Stockphoto list that Canon is ahead right now in the race for big size files and competitive price. I thought the D2H was going to be Nikon's most recent entry into the race - bigger file than the D-100 etc. But it wasn't. It's a PJ's camera.
If I could afford a digital at this point I'd probably haunt eBay until someone put a used D-100 up for less than the packages that the dealers have, and try to get it. The last one was going for around $1100 4 hours before the end of the auction. Since I'm not in the market I didn't stick around to find out what it closed at.
this is what Rob Miracle said to me about the D2H last week:
At 08:25 PM 9/14/2003 -0400, Emily L. Ferguson wrote:
You can get a D-100 on ebay for $1800 and it's files 6 megapixels. What are the advantages of the D2H?
Emily, there is more to a digital camera than megapixels.
The D2H is an 8 fps camera with 40 burst frames that has a faster response time than the F5. The D100 for instance has a noticeable shutter lag that makes shooting baseball very hard. It has a greatly improved AF engine with 11 focus points, 9 of which are cross type sensors laid out in a Rule of Thirds pattern plus two extra horizontal sensors on the sides. The camera has been engineered from the ground up for speed speed and more speed. Card Write speeds are faster. Image processing is faster etc.
The camera has a new Nikon designed sensor called LBCAST which is similar to CMOS in operation, but has lower noise and faster processing. The images are supposed to not have any jaggies at all in raw mode (JPEG's will put some in). There is supposed to be more recorded detail and from what we have seen from the limited samples going around, the camera will live up to expectation. Nikon has spent a lot of energy trying to get the image quality as good as possible. The images resize upwards even better than existing D100 images do, and a 4 MP image from the D2H may be more like a 6-11 megapixel image with its better resample abilities.
Early reports say that the out of camera colors and saturation are much better than previous Nikon bodies.
Now if that isn't enough to drive you to the store to buy one, here are some other goodies Nikon threw in. All the buttons and controls are shaped so that you can operate them with gloves on. The LCD is bigger and brighter. It now has a new Lithium ION battery system that promises more exposures per charge than the D100. It has better weather sealing and a 100% viewfinder. All photos are tagged vertical or horizontal and the new Nikon View software will auto rotate them.
Did I say it was fast?
Then Nikon threw in some goodies taken from other cameras like simultaneous JPEG+RAW saves, single shot long exposure noise reduction, etc.
And just for fun, they added an optional Wireless transmitter, so you can shoot in the field and beam your pics straight to a laptop.
Oh baby, oh, oh.
Rob --
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@cape.com 508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf
