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WE WANT Digital Back for the Nikon F5

I am now walloping with excitement of owning a d2h+ the WT-1a (to decorate it). After a set of test shots using the 28-70AFS, I certainly can't fault this piece of equipment. Colour rendering is superb, response time -exactly like my F5 and to my surprise, it has got the interval timing which my MF-28 offers. A very competent camera indeed.

Agreeably, it will be unlikely that I will derive any economic benefit from the d2h in the forseeable future, but the joy of owning another toy to play with justifies the purchase. Furthermore, I'm already handicapped by my inexperience in photography, so I have to mak it up to some extent with a better equipment, I presume. I don't want to spend my time manipulating images in photoshop but to have them, as much as possible, composed and processed in-camera( excluding sharpness)- just as you will do when shooting chromes.

I quite liked your comment regarding the "terminally anal twit", however if one is building a portfolio for stock libraries, my experience is that they carry loopes in their pockets to examine submitted images.

I have just tried to upsize an un-compressed NEF image derived from the d2h using a dedicated upsizing software, to about 220% yeilding about 66mb file size. At print size viewing, there's hardly any difference to the original image(without a loope) but when zoomed to the actual pixels the difference between them becomes very obvious; the upsized image has suffered a loss of its sharpness and contrast among others. Is there a better software than GFractal PrintPro which I also find very slow?
 
I have had great success using Photoshop's Bicubic resizing. I did try an action that resized it in small increments, but when printed could not see the slightest difference between that and a single-step resize. Perhaps it would please the obnoxious little man with the loupe and greasy nose.

Even straight out of the camera or scanner, when you get to the pixel level, things usually get ugly. It is like looking at the grain of an negative magnified large enough that you can actually see the grains clearly. Look at a photomural up close if you want to see ugly. Printed, the pixels are reduced to 240 or 300 pixels per inch and all the nasty stuff blends into a lovely print.

Hand a violin student a Stradivarius, and the sckrawks and screeches will not lie one bit more dulcet upon the ears. It is the skill of the artist that makes the art, and only when that skill is great does a superb instrument make a difference. If you are inexperienced in photography, an advanced camera will take up zero slack. It may well present additional demands that will in fact degrade your ability. It will certainly present a much greater learning curve.

If you are aiming at stock houses, you would probably be much farther ahead with one of the 8MP prosumer cameras announced last February at PMA. Double the resolution with no resizing, and superb quality as well for a third of the price of the D2H. They are, for the most part, general purpose cameras, while the D2H is highly specialized for newspaper sports and to some extent photojournalism. It is probably the last pro or prosumer camera on the planet I would choose for supplying stock. I do know stock by the way, I ran my own stock business along with shooting in Dallas Texas, way back when.

As a former sports specialist I drool over both the D2H and the 1D MkII, but strictly in the narrow context of sports photography. The WiFi feature alone would probably have added five years to my life from the stress I could have avoided. The huge buffer and high frame-rate would have been superb for covering NASCAR auto racing where there was almost always a dozen car crash at 190mph two thirds through the race, and motorized Nikon Fs allowed us to pick our shots with perfect timing.

These huge advantages for sports shooting have no application in general photography and probably account for 2/3 or more of the price of the camera. On top of that, it is just a 4MP camera! Yes, one can make good prints from an image that size, but when you can have double the pixels in a far more versatile camera at 1/3 the price, it seems wanton extravance to go with the D2H.

Of course, in the end it is your money. I have a friend who shoots almost exclusively with Minox - by choice. He likes the technical challenge. I like high quality photographs made with cameras that are not constantly getting in the way.

larry!
ICQ 76620504
http://www.larry-bolch.com/
 
Dear Larry,
having shot some comparably few images with the F5 it is difficult (though not impossible) to touch any consumer slr camera like the D70 and certainly not any point and shoot thing (even if they may be more competent cameras than I am a photographer). Infact it was the deficiencies of the D100 that led me into F5 in the first place, in terms of the clour accuracy, time lag and controls.

The stock library I am targetting will not touch any image upsized using photoshop CS features. They recommend the GF Fractal instead.

I do go to shoot motor racing and Ascot when time permits. Note! I do not gamble. For up to A3+ images which I intend to frame for future exhibitions, I 'm content that the d2h will do a good job of it. Therefore, up to the A3+ prints and sports/photojournalism the d2h is the proverbial "one jacket fits all" camera. My F5 will now be dedicated in the main to shoot chromes and Kodak Techpan which I've stocked-up. I may in future subscribe to the d2x if it will render my F5 archaic and incompetent in terms of image delivery which I doubt very much.

The Fuji velvia, Kodak 400UC, Kodak Technical Pan will hardly be displaced by the current trend of digicams. Landscape and architecture shots remains in the province of the F5 with my array of superior Nikon wide angles including the PC lenses- full frame. Where any such shots will do or should be taking very quickly then the d2h will do just fine with limited loss of image quality of the type you find in some of the point and shoot cameras including the 8mp Coolpix (In my hands).

Thanks again Larry for your kind contributions while we await the review of the d2x.
 
On Tuesday, August 31, 2004, Larry N. Bolch (Lnbolch) wrote:

"... I never expect to use my arsenal of Nikon lenses on a digital camera."

I did!

I selected the Nikon system in the late 1960's because I bought into Nikon's advertising hype at the time, which boasted, "Nikon makes obsolescence obsolete."

After investing in an arsenal of Nikon lenses that range from 18mm to 1000mm, I have been very disappointed that Nikon did not live up to those words.

I doubt that Nikon would have lost the professional market to Canon if Nikon had lived up to their promise.
 
I expected to use my lenses as well, up to a few years back. Then I saw Contax struggling with their full-frame camera, and eventually failing. I watched Kodak's disaster with their full-frame Nikon lens compatible. I see the only successful full-frame - the Canon 1Ds - at $12,000CDN. Obviously, the full-frame sensor and electronics are devilishly difficult and expensive to do.

How has Nikon not lived up to the words "Nikon makes obsolescence obsolete"?

I expect that you and I and the world have changed much more than Nikon has in those four decades. Last time I looked at Nikon's web site, you could still buy a slew of film cameras to take those lenses. They still make the F3 and a bunch of MANUAL lenses!

That they have not lived up to the promise is crap. They have done so to the point that in many ways, Canon has breezed past them.

Were I to buy a D70 - the most limited entry-level dSLR body that Nikon makes - I could still use my manual lenses manually, with a hand-held light meter. It would be absurd to expect a digital electronic camera to be able to miraculously make a manual focus lens into an autofocus lens, or programmed auto-exposure lens. It would be equally absurd for Nikon to refuse to build an automatic camera, because the old manual lenses would not work automatically. Neither technology, the competitors - nor the world - stands still for Nikon.

When you and I started using Nikons, digital electronics were room-filling, run by a whited-coated priesthood. There is far more computing power in a prosumer digital camera - or cell phone for that matter - than in the whole room of boxen, terminals, line-printers and nine-track tape drives. Technology has moved an incredible distance, yet I can still walk into a store and still buy a lens for my F3 that is every bit as manual as it is.

Were it as easy to build a full-frame 24mm x 36mm sensor and support electronics as it is to build the APS sized 23.7 x 15.5 mm sensor, then I would certainly consider using my old lenses. However, I will not buy a marginal camera like the Kodak that really only works well with bright strobes in the studio, nor could I buy a $12,000CDN body no matter how well it works.

The problem is the size of the DX sensor. My 28mm PC-Nikkor has been a workhorse from the first week I had it. It paid for itself totally the first day on the job. However, at 28mm, it has never been quite wide enough. With the DX sensor, it becomes the equivalent of a 42mm lens - which would be absurd.

Nikon is not alone with this. Until the 1D MkII, Canons have had an even more severe cropping/magnification factor of 1.6x with the 1D MkII down to 1.3x. IIRC, the Sigma is at 1.7x. Pentax at 1.6x, Fuji and the upcoming Minolta at 1.5x. Olympus would be 2x, but none of its legacy glass works on the E1, since they started with a blank piece of paper and built the camera with no backward compatibility at all. Probably Oly is the wisest of the lot, making a clean break with the past.

larry!
ICQ 76620504
http://www.larry-bolch.com/
 
For me, one of the most important features of a professional-quality camera system is the ability to select from an assortment of accessories to configure the camera to the assignment. Some of the Nikon accessories included view screens, film cassettes, extension rings, filters, viewfinders, bellows, motor drives, film backs, and lenses.

When I replace an old Nikon body with a new Nikon body, I really would like to be able to use all my old accessories instead of buying new ones. If I have to replace all my old Nikon accessories, I may as well explore the possibility of replacing my entire Nikon system with another system.

Please don’t misunderstand me; I am not saying that Canon or any other camera manufacturer is doing a better job of “making obsolescence obsolete.†I am, however, saying, that I am trying to wait for Nikon to make a decent full frame digital camera because when I seriously go digital, I really don’t want to get rid of my old Nikon accessories.

I love the idea that I can buy a Nikon D70 that accepts my old Nikon lenses. I don’t care that I have to manually focus my lenses because I do that anyway. I don’t mind that the meter doesn’t work with my lenses because I usually use a hand meter. I don’t even mind that my view screens, film cassettes, motor drives, film backs, and viewfinders are useless with the D70. However, the loss of the wide-angle effect of my 18 to 35mm lenses is not acceptable. I will continue to wait for Nikon to make a full frame digital camera before I buy a Nikon digital. I just wish they would hurry.
 
Hi Everyone,
Analogue photography is dead. Long live F5. Well the debate about a digiback for the F5 may now be buried because Nikon had since offered one with the lunching of the Coolscan series. It took me quite some time to realize it, but there you are. I wonder how many owners of an F5 with the Super Coolscan will be rushing out for the new D2X. I expect such F5 owners to head for D70 as a compliment or perhaps a D2H.
As I predicted, the new D2X has no edge, in terms of technology, over the D2H other than its pixel count. Had the D2X offered a sensitivity rating (ISO) of 25- 800 and a larger bufer size then, I would have been considering a shift of position from my beloved F5.
 
Larry:

I tip my hat to you. You embarked on a new format, did your homework and certainly show well for your efforts and more importantly to me as a teacher, you teach. You are a giver and an accomplished photographer. I also appreciate the effort you put forth in your posts.

Thank You


Gilbert
 
> Posted by Gilbert James (Gjames52) on Friday, September 17, 2004 - > 3:55 am: > > Larry: > > I tip my hat to you. You embarked on a new format, did your homework > and certainly show well for your efforts and more importantly to me as > a teacher, you teach. You are a giver and an accomplished > photographer. I also appreciate the effort you put forth in your > posts.

As a photojournalist and location photographer, I was constantly moving through formats from 35mm to 8x10, and moving between B&W, colour negative and chrome film. The digital realm was also familiar - Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers - once told me that I was the first artist ever to use a personal computer. Others played with graphics before me, but they were out of a tech background.

By the time Nikon produced the CP990, I could see the writing clearly upon the wall, and felt it was time to add a digital camera. At that point, the CP990 was clearly the state of the art in compact design cameras. Having worked with scanned images, my expectations were rather low about a 3.34MP camera, and I was delighted and surprised to discover what fine prints it made. I was also somewhat stunned by its sophistication and learning curve.

I went through the manual page by page with camera in hand, then went shooting. A couple of months later, I repeated the process with the manual, which brought me to the top of the curve and it was smooth sailing from thence forth.

I have always done my homework, since I had to justify any purchase against the bottom line. Camera equipment has always been "tools of the trade". I have never been a camera buff - cameras have never been an end in themselves, but a means to an end. The image is the thing - the only thing. I use whatever tool is at my disposal to best achieve it.

I have learned so much from the masters of photography who came before me, and deeply appreciate what they accomplished and how they did so. It has been a very rewarding career, and now I have a chance to pass on whatever part of my experience may help the next wave. I write here and in a number of other forums, maintain my web-site and always try to find the time to answer questions on the street or wherever I run into another photographer.

When I answer a question, I try to explain the foundation for my answer, so there is an understanding of the process by which it was arrived at. Saying "...try f-5.6 at 1/250th at ISO200" may solve an immediate problem, but does not help in the long run. The old "Give a man a fish and he will be nourished for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will be nourished for a lifetime" applies.

Off topic, but I must throw in a variation on that for your amusement. "Build a man a fire, and he will be warm for the night. Set a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life!" :)

larry! ICQ 76620504 http://www.larry-bolch.com/
 
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