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Nikon D100 6MP Digital SLR Camera

Nikon D100 6MP Digital SLR Camera

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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Camera Good-Nikon Service is terrible
Review: Obviously from the other reviews the camera is fine. The problem is if you have a problem with it. My auto-focus gave out about a week after the warrant ended. I was charged $775.00 to repair it. Nikon kept it for 38 days. Sent it back and never reapaired the problem.

They took it back worked on it for a week- waived the $293.00 charge. Guess what? I am on holsd with the service department as it was sent back with the same problem.

Speaking of service forget about ever speaking to a real person unless you have 2-4 hours to kill.

never again .

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A source of more info
Review: OK, I haven't bought a D100 - yet. But I'm in the market for a replacement for my ancient Kodax digital, and I've just about decided that the Nikon D100 is going to be it.

For one thing, my main non-digital SLR was a Nikon FG and I loved it. I acquired a high end Minolta, but I never liked it as much as the Nikon, and I have several Nikon AF lens and a couple of Tamrons, and I've always sorry that I couldn't use them with digital photography. The new digital camera bodies solve this problem.

The suggestion: go to www.nikon.com and click the D100 image at the bottom of the page. You'll get a **complete** set of detailed views and specs for the D100, almost a users manual (except it isn't downloadable) in the form of mousable images of all the controls and features. Answers almost any question you might have. (There is a listing of specs that is downloadable).

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The best buy for Nikon D series
Review: Stop reading this review and just buy this wonderful camera if you're serious about digital photography.

There are only two REAL digital interchangable SLR to choose from. Nikon D1H or D100. If you are not a photojournalist, needing to carry your gear to desert war zone, and extreme environments. You don't need the ruggedness of D1H, which is based on the F5 body. If you don't need the insanely large memory buffer of D1H, D100 will satisfy all your need.

D100 has higher resolution than both the extremely fast D1H and the higher resolution cousin D1X (but slower), at half their price. The only thing that's lacking is a smaller memory buffer, hence slower, and a slower flash sync at 1/180. Unless you're doing a lot of daylight fill-flash, I wouldn't worry about this limitation.

Since the D100 is based on the N80, it's comfortable to hold and use. The user interface is so much better than Canon's. It's more ergonomic and comfortable than the more expensive Canon too. Not to mention that Canon's is lacking a playback zoom feature which I find it very important in Digital. You don't want to download your photo to your notebook computer every dozen shots to examine the details and sharpness, do you?

Of course, it can use all your Nikkor lens. (That's the main reason I'd never buy Contax, Pentax or Minota's digital camera. Their lens selection is just too limited.)

Just buy it and you'd be happy.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: D100 Shortcomings
Review: The D100 camera is great. I shoot in raw format. It has two short comings. First, your can only take four pictures and then you have to wait for the buffer to become empty. I wish Nikon had a service to increase the size of the buffer for pictures shot in raw mode. For every other JPEG mode the buffer is not a problem. Second, the zoom controls on the rear viewer do not work in raw format. They work just fine in JPEG. I really like the camera and have printed hundreds of 13 X 19 pictures on the Epson 2200 printer. ...just my two cents!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very good ....but
Review: There are plenty of reviews here and elsewhere that extol the virtues of this camera and I have found the quality to be very good. At this stage I don't plan on using film again.

But, three issues need to be pointed out to prospective buyers.

TTL flash. If you have enjoyed using TTL flash on your nikon film cameras for years and have learned to love it, beware. The D100 does not support TTL flash, only D-TTL. Your trusty macro ring flash or SB26 will not work in TTL mode. Read the owners manual online to check the flash compatability list before you commit. You can use your flash in manual mode and get instant feedback on the lcd monitor, but if your subject has flown and your manual setting was wrong, tough! The strange thing is the the Fuji S2 which uses nikon lenses and flashes can work in TTL flash mode. If flash is very important to you then look at the S2.

Another issue to remember is the ccd sensor is smaller than a 35mm frame so there is a 1.5x magnification factor applied to all of your lenses. This is great news for your 300mm f2.8, which becomes 450mm f2.8, wow! In my case it is not so good when my 18-35mm goes to 27-52.5mm. For all you wide angle devotees, 27mm is nothing like 18mm is it? You can now buy a 12-18mm lens especially for nikon digitals but it is not cheap and it won't work on your film cameras.

Finally, if you plan on using the bulb setting for exposures of a few minutes, such as for astrophotography, The results may disappoint. There is not only electroluminescence picked up from other on-chip electronics, but the chip appears to heat up with long exposures. If you do 3 x 5 minute exposures with the lens cap on, the noise level increases significantly with each exposure. This makes dark frame subtraction dangerous as you may well loose photographic data. The camera would probably perform better in very low ambient temperatures, but I haven't tried that so far.

Otherwise an excellent camera.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good picture quality, light on build quality
Review: This camera delivers nice pictures most of the time, but it is lightly built, very plasticy.

Image quality: I find it a bit too noisey for the money, and somewhat lacking in detail. Not a big enough imporovement over the 5MP Sony F717 to justify the cost difference. In some instances the Sony is better.

Overall quality: The F717 seems heavier duty, it is all metal and although the body is smaller, it feels heavier that the D100. Not a lot, but a nice solid piece of work compared to the plasticy Nikon. The D100 feels hollow, cheap for an expensive DSLR. The menu systems are not very intuitive, and sometimes the camera won't take a picture until you get out of them.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Dream Come True!
Review: This camera is the answer to my dreams. Not only can I see what I'm shooting right away, I can rest assured that I didn't mess up an entire wedding or photo shoot! The quality of the photos are AWESOME!
One of the best things that made me buy this camera is the lenses to my other Nikon AF's fit this one (besides the fact I've been a long time Nikon fan). I was a little skeptical about the price, but this has me convinced that there is nothing better than this camera.
With a 512 MB memory card, I can get over 150 of the finest quality pictures. I print them out on my hp photosmart 1215 and they are perfect! Add Photoshop, and we got game!!
The battery on this seems to last forever! I've done 2 photo shoots (with animals!) and played around with it quite a bit, and the battery is still at full level. Instructions are easy to understand, it's easy to download, and it is just plain SWEET!
I've still got a lot to discover with this camera, but so far, it's worth the money! If you're a serious amature or a pro, this camera is the best. I'm ready to get rid of the old "film cameras" and buy another one!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: An amateur camera for "prosumers"
Review: This is a brilliant amateur camera for what Nikon calls the prosumer market- consumers who fancy themselves professionals on the basis of having taken pictures for cousin George's wedding. When used with Nikon lenses and accessories it performs extremely well and is rugged enough but lacks those features that allow adaptation of the camera body for technical uses, live TV monitoring, bellows use or anything that made the F series wonderful for innovation in imaging. In other words, if you want Nikon to dictate the limitations of your cameras based on marketing concepts this is a swell camera and cheap. On the other hand, do not think of the D100 as a backup to professional cameras as the Nikkormat was for years. Neither should one depend on the owners manual to be forthcoming about the camera's limitations, the telephone help line is hopeless and the best information is on Nikon's UK website.
It's strictly prosumer man.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Good Camera, Be Careful
Review: This is a good camera, but it's a little behind the times. The only real complaint is the requirement to purchase a special adapter to use commerical lights etc.

The software and features are also a little dated, but it's still a pretty good deal overall, if you cant spend 5 Grand on a camera (The new DX2) it's a good choice.

Next year they are supposed to be bringing out updated pro-sumer SLR's but I still think the camera is a great value for your money.

[...]

[...]

Good luck, great camera.



Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Awesome. This camera heralds the death of film.
Review: This is an awesome digital picture-taking machine, which heralds the imminent death of 35 mm film. The D-100 does pretty much everything that a high-end film SLR does, and it does it beautifully. A 512MB CF card will enable the D100 to take hundreds of high-quality pictures that are indistinguishable in quality from those taken with film. The Six-megapixel images in Large/Fine or RAW mode are quite competitive with their film counterparts for almost all purposes. The advantage of digital, of course, is that the consumer, equipped with pretty much any computer, can process and print the pictures him or her self with far more power and flexibility than one had in a darkroom processing film. The digital darkroom has arrived.

The D100 can use Nikon's entire line of autofocus lenses and many of the older manual focus lenses, allowing the photographer to easily migrate from film to digital. The camera has spot, matrix, and center-weighted exposure options, a programmed mode, apature priority or speed priority, as well as all of the manual options. Autofocus is crisp, fast, and works very well in low light. This camera is nearly as powerful in terms of its focusing and exposure options as the Nikon F5, which is the film camera I used for years before replacing my F5 with the D100.

Perhaps the greatest testimonial for the D100 is that it is notorious that the vast majority of photographers who I know who have bought a D100 never (or at least rarely) shoot film ever again.

The D100 takes OK shots right out of the camera, but to get best results most photographers will want to "process" the pictures through either Nikon's own program "Capture 3" or an aftermarket program like Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. I and probably most others have found that some of the post-processing settings on these programs really improve the images produced by the D100. This is a deliberate design "feature" of the D100 in that the D100 anticipates that serious photographers wish to retain a certain amount of control over their images. Accordingly, rather than making all of the decisions for you, the D100 produces images for which final exposure and contrast decisions can and should be made in a post-processing program such as Adobe Photoshop Elements or Capture 3. That having been said, the D100 can and does produce fine images without using a post-processing program. But almost all users have probably found that the best results are achieved by using such a program. In my opinion this is true of pretty much all of the high-end digital cameras out there, and is not confined to the D100. This is the power of digital photography--the photographer, at little cost (a low-end PC and $100-200 program are all that are required) can have a powerful "digital darkroom" which yields tremendous control over how the images turn out.

Physically, the D100 is ruggedly built. The rear LCD is bright and clear. The menu systems on the D100 are very well designed and quite intuitive--after familiarizing myself with the manual for several hours, I now find that I do not need to refer to the manual at all even for very complex "custom" situations. The menus are not overly "layered" as is the case with some digital cameras. The on-board flash is fine for snapshot portraits and the like, but most serious users will want to spring for either the SB-50DX or the SB-80DX flash, both of which are more or less designed for the D100.

Negatives on the camera are few. I mentioned above the post-processing issue, which in my mind is not a negative, but instead is just Nikon giving the photographer as much power and flexibility as possible. The matrix metering is not as powerful on the D100 as on the top-of-the-line F5, inasmuch as in tricky lighting situations the D100s center-weighted or spot metering will sometimes yield better results. Having said that, after several hours of experimenting I can now confidently take consistently good pictures with the D100 in fill-flash conditions. In common with the exposure issues, the D100 more or less requires photographers who want very "sharp" images to apply "sharpness" post-processing. Most of us have probably found that this produces better results than setting the sharpening in-camera, for reasons that exceed the scope of this review.

By the way, the battery life in the D100 is phenomenal. The on-board proprietary Nikon battery lets you take many hundreds of pictures, and serious shooters can buy at modest cost the MD-100 accessory which lets you shoot with either 2 Nikon batteries or a bunch of AAs. Either way this allows you to literally shoot all weekend likely without needing to recharge. The Nikon batteries recharge in a bit over an hour.

For good reason the D100, retailing now (October 2003) below $1,500, has put powerful digital photography in the hands of serious amateurs. It is a well-designed and sturdy camera that is a delight to own and use.


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