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(More customer reviews)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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Nikon D100 6MP Digital SLR CameraAs digital imaging continues to make inroads into the world of professional photography, Nikon's release of the D100 proves that far from being a flash in the pan, digital SLRs really can make a valuable contribution.
Styled around the more traditional N80, the D100 has a full-featured body, is nicely weighted and considerably lighter than you might expect, given the amount of technology that's packed into it. The controls are nicely situated, and navigating through the settings using the provided four-way movement pad becomes second nature very quickly. Picture preview comes courtesy of the built-in 1.8-inch LCD screen, which allows for a cursory check of any pictures taken. Unlike earlier Nikon products, it's not possible to use the screen on the D100 as an alternate viewfinder, restricting its use in tight situations, but the results through the "traditional" viewfinder are perfectly adequate.
As you would expect from a 6-megapixel camera, the image quality is superb at all levels, from the highest resolution (a mighty 3,008 x 2,000 pixels) down to a less intense 1,504 x 1,000 pixels. At any resolution, the output images are really very good, color saturation is well up to par, and overall the results stand up well. On the downside, perfectionists may well find there's a tiny amount less definition, but there's nothing here to raise anything approaching serious issues.
Power is provided from a supplied rechargeable battery pack, which is both light and long lasting--up to a maximum of two hours, depending on flash usage. To recharge from empty takes around two hours, so it would be worth investing in a second pack. The D100 takes Type I and II CompactFlash as well as Microdrive units, which are invaluable for users looking to take any more than a handful of pictures in a single session. Our tests showed a 256 MB CF card could handle around 40 high-resolution uncompressed TIFF images, suddenly making a 1 GB Microdrive look extremely attractive.
The built-in flash unit, which pops up above the lens, is powerful and efficient, proving effective in a variety of conditions. Unlike many digital cameras, it only fires a single flash, effectively reducing red-eye without sacrificing performance.
It's difficult not to be impressed by the D100. It's a stylish and good-looking camera that proves that beauty isn't just skin deep by providing results well above expectation. The inclusion of the fast-charge battery pack means downtime is kept to a minimum, and the software packages provided by Nikon (including NikonView 5) make it easy to manipulate your images and save them out to hard drive, CD, or DVD. This is not a cheap buy, especially when you consider the base price excludes any form of lens, but for those with deep pockets the D100 is a force to be reckoned with. --Elly Russell
Pros:
Superb image quality--up to 3,008 x 2,000 pixels
Nicely weighted, full-featured body
Compatible with Microdrives
Cons:
Noticed a bit less definition to images
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