Topic: D70 (Page 1 of 1)

Anyone using the D70?
If so would you recommend it?

Net reviews seem very favourable although the issue of moire crops up here and there.

My college has one, and I'm the only student to get my hands on it so far. I want one for myself. I would certainly reccomend it. I haven't used it too much, but I'm very picky with cameras and this one blows me away.

The local store will give me 15 days to try one out.
So I think i'll go for it.

Will shoot a "roll" and compare it to my F2S and my FX90 (N90S).

Have Nikkor lenses so this seems to be the best bet if i go digital/DLSR.

I've had one for about half a year now. Shot a couple of thousand pictures already. And wouldn't change it for anything - well, maybe for a D2X, if I had the money...

The D70 is by no means perfect. Then again, which camera is...? It has its own quirks and it lacks a few features that I sometimes miss. Such as the additional shutter release and command wheels for vertical framing. But those are far from critical omissions.

The camera produces excellent pictures. The resolution is outstanding; partly due to the slightly weaker low pass filter in front of the CCD. On the other hand, this may occasionally result in undesirable colour artifacts in heavily patterned areas of the picture (especially b/w or grayscale areas). This, however, is not a bug or fault in the camera, but quite simply a technical choice they made. You can't have both high resolution and a picture free of interference and interpolation artifacts. I like it better this way.

Also, D70's colour reproduction is excellent. The automatic white balance works pretty much the same way as the human eye - most of the time. That means that in artificial lighting the pictures won't necessarily be of the exact right colour, but pretty close to the colours we see in the same lighting. To get correct colours you can always use the presets or measure the white balance "by hand". IMHO, they could have made the measuring process a little bit simpler...

What amazes me most is that Nikon has managed to keep the CCD noise very very low. It's almost as low as in the legendary Canon CMOS-cameras. With the difference that when the noise starts to show on higher ISO levels, it's not nearly as disturbing as the more colourful and saturated noise of the Canon cameras.

The 18-70 mm kit lens is, although very affordable, of very good quality. It's sharp, contrasty and it focuses very quickly and silently. The only things where the price shows are the plastic construction and the slightly annoying fact that it doesn't keep its focus when zooming. Well, with automatic focusing that's a small annoyiance. It also has a pretty strong barrel distortion, especially at the wide angle end, which may disturb in some situations.

As a summary... In D70 you get a helluva lot of camera for a buck. It's of high quality and its ergonomic design is superb. You can't go wrong...

++jto

Whew... It's good to be back. It's quite a while since I was taken to the intensive care outside of Asylum...

--jto