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Nikon D70 camera update

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Nikon D70 camera update

Post by Mike Jackson »

Doug Bernhardt asked a question about digital cameras a coupe of weeks ago, buried in another post. He was asking about cameras with hard to use (or easy to use) menus.

Back in December of last year, I was searching around on the net and trying to make up my mind on a new camera. Danny Baronian is going through the same search right now, too.

I ended up buying a Nikon D70 with the "outfit" lense in January. I received a $100 rebate from Nikon a month or so later. I was replacing my Nikon CoolPix 990 camera which had shot over 10,000 photos. I could still shoot a bunch more, but a was ready to move to a more professional camera with interchangeable lenses, better resolution, and higher pixel count. More than that, wanted a more responsive camera for action shots.

After over 2,000 shots, I can say I am very satisfied with the D70, and especially at the price range of that camera. At 6 megapixels, there are cameras with higher resolution and with even quicker frames per second, but many of them are much more money. This one has roughly twice the resolution of the old 990 and has much better lenses. I had been using a Nikon SB-28 flash, but recently added the new top of the line SB-800 flash. The camera and the flash are amazing together! Wow! I am getting great shots, even using the automatic settings on both. The battery life is absolutely great on the camera. So far, I have never shot so many photos in one day to run it down...only when I left it turned on when hooked to the computer for a few hours.

And back to Doug's question, the menus are easy to navigate and generally easy to understand. Many are available through the LED on the top of the camera, just by pressing the right button and scrolling using the thumb wheel. All things considered, however, it doesn't need any adjustments for most shots.

Mike
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Post by Ron Berlier »

Mike,

Have you had a chance to download the new upgade for the camera yet? Any problems to report?

Also, here is a useful forum for those interested in the D70/D70s

http://www.nikonians.org/cgi-bin/dcforu ... =DCConfID3
Ron Berlier
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Post by Mike Jackson »

Ron, I haven't done the software upgrade yet. I have been following that forum off and on and it seems to go smoothly for most. I was complaining to Danny Baronian that I didn't think it was shooting at three frames per second. Danny found a post on that forum telling us to set the Noise Reduction in Long Exposure to OFF. After doing that, the camera is much quicker when shooting continuous photos.

Mike
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Post by Danny Baronian »

I decided to get the Nikon D70 after talking to Mike, viewing the pictures he's taken, and reviewing many of the comments on the site Ron listed.

Here are several galleries that also helped in my decision in going with the D70:

http://www.jimtardio.com/france/normandy/normandy.html
http://www.jimtardio.com/france/provence/provence.html

Here's another site worth looking at:

http://www.pbase.com/ronnie_14187/ronni ... s&page=all

While Ronnie used a D100 Digital, the D70 is considered to be the next step up in this class of digital camera, I believe in the right hands, the same results can be obtained.

Images from both galleries exhibit similar results that can be expected from this line of cameras: excellent contrast, color and sharpness.

After many positive comments from Mike based on his use of the camera, and digging through reviews, I ordered the D70s Friday. I'd considered purchasing a higher end camera, but after looking at the D70 and it's price of anywhere from $ 900 - 1,200 for the D70, for my use it's hard to justify the additional 2 - 3 thousand dollars for a higher end camera, when with proper care and handling will produce the same results for most general photography. I also realized that many cameras that 6 months to a year ago, costing in the 2-4 thousand dollar range, lost half their value within 4-6 months. I'd rather have a camera depreciate $ 600, rather than 1-2 thousand in the same period, knowing a few years down the road, you'll be in the market for the next best digital.

Another consideration is size and weight. The D70 is a little over a pound while higher priced Nikons and Canons are more in the range of 2.5 - 3 pounds without a lens. Added to the additional weight, the cameras are considerably larger. That's heaver and larger than my old Hasselblad with a 120mm lens.

Now all I have to do is sell off all my film cameras. Give them another year or two and they'll be worth about as much as a computer with a dos operating system.

If anyone is looking for a view camera with lenses, 3-35mm's and an assortment of lenses, drop me a note.
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Post by Doug Bernhardt »

Thanx Mike, Ron and Danny.....you've helped alot here as did the sites. Have done quite a bit of reading and the D70s is high on list. Basically the canon we have now...(a good entry camera a few years ago) is WAY to menu driven and am looking for a digital to be as much like my 35mm's with all the advantages that are digital...and there are quite a few. The lense stabilizers or anti-shake components are also High on my list . Am curious why the D70 rather than the D70s...something I've missed? Dpreview is a great site for anyone looking to buy.
http://www.dpreview.com/
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Post by Danny Baronian »

Got my camera this morning, and have done very little work since then.

The difference between the D70 and 70s are minor. Larger LCD, slightly faster startup, newer firmware, improved battery, but to repeat, minor improvements. Search around and you can find the D70 from reliable photo shops w/ rebate for $ 895.00. I paid 8 for the 995, and the D70 series is a good DSLR, worlds apart from the 995. New terms all the time - Digital single lens reflex. B&H photo in New York is a good source.

If you want to save a little, get the D70. The firmware can be updated on the 70, and from what Mike says is a very fast camera, both on startup and rapid sequence pictures. I think this camera has done it for me as far as film. The images are excellent, the camera feels and handles very well, and the lens that comes in the kit - 18 - 70, is a good range.

For anyone jumping from film to digital, use a factor of x 1.5 to understand the difference of focal length for film vs digital - thus an 18 mm lens on digital is the equivalent of a 27mm lens on a film camera. The D70 then has a lens equivalent of a 27 - 105 lens.

I went from a Nikon 995 to the D70. This blows the 995 out of the water. It will do the same for your canon. Without getting into the canon vs nikon, nikon has learned and improved from the rebel with the release of the D70, which feels and looks like a good quality camera without breaking the bank.

For menu selection, you can pick up the camera without reading the manual and make adjustments as need. The menu selection is very well thought out and user friendly.

One impressive camera.

Here's another site. No digital, but it will show the quality of Nikon optics in the hands of a craftsman:

http://www.mountainlight.com/gallery.html
Danny Baronian
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Guest

Post by Guest »

All I know is that the D70 is a favorite choice of newspapers for their field reporters. That seems a heckuva recommendation, considering the use and abuse of cameras in that profession.
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Post by Ron Berlier »

Danny,

:?: I'm a bit, as always confused. So, you bought the D70"S" or the D70? Also, is somewhat safe to assume you ordered it from B&H?

Oh what the heck, what size card, etc. did you add on to the order? :D

Don,

I have to agree that the reporters use of the D70 is an excellent statement with respect to reliability.

Ron
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Post by Danny Baronian »

Nikon D70s kit which includes a 18-70 mm lens; purchased seperately - a uv filter and a 1 gig type II SanDisk compact flash, from B&H, New York.
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Post by Mike Jackson »

I found this informaton while reading about a lense:
BTW, if you're based in the US, J&R is selling the same lens for $129.88. I was able to get Ritz Camera (the website, actually) to price match it, and paid no tax, no shipping. If you're buying, call RitzCamera.com (their website and stores are registered as different merchants) at 1-877-690-0099, tell them what you want to buy, and then point them to J&R. They'll offer to price match. With Ritz, you pay no tax and no shipping.
It sounds like J&R sells quite cheap, and then Ritz will match the other price.

Mike
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Love my D70

Post by John Grenier »

We bought ours around Christmas. This camera is great and our old lenses work with varying degrees of automation. But you can use a compleley manual lense if you like.

Something I want to do is get a tiff file but have not learned how yet.

We use macs around here.

John
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Post by Sarah Schwartz »

i got into Canon DSLR back with the D30 but have been one of the unlucky ones to always get a camera that has focus problems and has to be sent in which is major hassle. I and others have had to send in multiple times to get the same problem fixed. Because of this I have been thinking of going to different brand if I get another although i have some dollars invested in Canon lenses.

I recently went to a local camera store and tried the 20D and the D70s. I am very impressed with the Nikon and I think that they can be sharpened up better than the Canon. Ronnie Gaubert is a true master with his D100. He always uses a tripod and has more patience with it than I do.

I recently read on Nikonians that Nikon has registerred the D200 name and usually comes out with new camera soon after it registers a name so the long awaited D100 successor may be coming soon.

John if you mean get a tiff file from the D70 photos, you have to shoot raw and convert it, saving to tiff. I always shoot raw for the greater processing versatality

I certainly recommend stabilized lenses in either brand if you do a lot of handheld shots and arent steady as a rock.

http://www.pbase.com/sasc
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Post by Doug Bernhardt »

Will have more to report in a week or so, as I just posted something similar in response to Doug Fieldiers question/post re; old book.
So, to be more spesific...I got the D70s with a VR lense which seems quite good for the purpose in mind....low available light. I arrived at these choices after some research and experience. My first trip to England was with a Nikon 35mm and slide film...tungsten which I pushed to 1200 ASA and Kodachrome for outdoor shots. Inspite of all my experience at rock concerts etc etc in the 60's and 70's the photos were n in comparison to others taken by friends with digital cameras. The next year which was 'o3 We took a Canon G4 digital and the results were way over the top in comparison. The canon however was very menu dependant....by that I mean simple adjustments are deep in a menu , unlike the nikon, much of which seem to be simple fingertip adjustments. I do still have reservations about the D70s and the software isn't as easy to use, but the camera is.
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Post by Sarah Schwartz »

Doug, invest in Nikon Capture and shoot RAW. Much better results. The nikon in camera jpgs arent as good as a jpg from converted RAW. Also if you use the wrong color balance or exposure you can correct it. There are also third party RAW converters. Breezebrowser, CaptureOne and Rawshooter. Rawshooter is free and works well. Nikon is doing something with their new cameras now that third party cant read them. I dont think it applies to the D70s and Rawshooter can handle them. Canon software is pretty lame too. I never use it although their stitching program isnt bad.

Rawshooter
http://www.pixmantec.com/
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Post by Mike Jackson »

Doug,
Do a google search for ACDsee on the Internet, then download their trial program. After using it a month, I paid the $59 price and have been totally happy with the image viewing software. It is great for organizing and moving photos. It has a lot of nice features, plus a lot of features I will never use, but it is easy to send a file to Photoshop for editing and back. It also has a very powerful "properties" feature which will tell you just about everything you could ever ask about any photo you have taken with your camera.

Image

Image

I didn't like the software that came with the Nikon either. I believe Rick Sacks recommended this software earlier when I asked about a good image viewer.

Mike
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Post by Mike Jackson »

Sarah,
Our family went on a camping trip in the "Winds" of Wyoming over the weekend. Some of the thumbnails can be seen in the screen grab above. On two mornings, I got up way before the sun broke over the east mountains and set up my tripod and camera. I shot a few photos in some of the auto settings, then switched over to apature mode and set it to F29, figuring it didn't matter how long the exposure took while on the tripod. Some were a slow as 1/6th of a second. The shots looked good on the LCD view on the back of the camera. When I got home, I looked at all the shots in ACDsee and was a bit annoyed to see three little black dots on many of the shots, all in the same place on each photo. After viewing the stats on those shots, it was apparent that all the ones shot at the small apature and long exposures had them, while the ones shot at 1/250 didn't. Apparently, there were a few small specks of dust on my lense and the longer exposure shots were affected more by them.

The dots will be easy to fix in Photoshop, but I can report that I learned some new lessons about long exposure photography.

Mike
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Post by Sarah Schwartz »

Mike that sounds like dust on the sensor. Usually you cant even notice dust on the lens. Its not unknown for a camera to come brand new with dust on sensor. A good way to check for that is to take an exposure of the clear sky with a way stopped down lens. F22 or more.
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Post by Mike Jackson »

Sarah,
The dust does seem to be on the sensor. We went to several all star baseball games with plenty of dust and wind. Do you know if it can be cleaned off by the user, or have to be sent off to a service center?
Mike
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Post by Mike Jackson »

Follow Up:
I browsed around on the Nikonians forum and it seems most digital cameras can get dust on the sensor, and it can happen regularly. Several people recommended a Giotto Rocket, which is a rubber shringe shaped like a kids 1950s rocket with a small air tip. The cost around $12.50. I tried picking one up at all three local camera stores, but none had them and none offered to order one for me. Wierd...but I guess they didn't see enough profit in it for them. I spent around $2000 with one of them already this year, but I guess the guy I spoke with didn't know or care. It will be that much easier to spend my $1300 for a telephoto lense over the Internet next time. B&H will probably get my business now.

Anyway, I found an old shringe here from one of the kid's infant days. I read the manual to find out how to clean the sensor. This shringe is too small and not powerful enough, but it did move the dots around on my photos to new places and removed a few. The dust specks are much too small for me to see but the camera picks them up at stopped down aperatures and slow speeds. The Nikonians Forum advised everyone to stay from using a compressor or canned air, possibly voiding the warranty.

Mike
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Post by Sarah Schwartz »

I have Canon so not sure but I think both brands are similar on cleaning. They have all sorts of things for sale for doing it. I bought some eclipse fluid but never have used it. Before I got that and before they were selling liquids, I got disgusted with blowing and just used a qtip and spit on my D30 and it worked just fine. Spit has the property to clean things well and we used it all the time on photos back in the old pasteup days. Some have been talking about using Scotch magic tape on Nikons. Heres a couple links. Major importance is to have a very fresh charged battery or household current that is on an UPS and not going to go out while the mirror is up. With Canon that would cause it to go down while you were cleaning and disaster

http://www.pbase.com/miljenko/sensor_cleaning
http://www.pbase.com/copperhill/ccd_cleaning
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Post by Doug Bernhardt »

have followed with interest and sounds like dust on the CCD sensor to me also Goldie. There was a kit they offered me when I got my D70 which I declined as I won't be changing lenses for quite a while. This is the time(according to reports) that the dust becomes an issue. Also am surprised and disappointed to hear of your proplems with the photo shop...idiot thinking. Will snoop over the recommended software as something has to be better....got home to download about 2 1/2 gigs of foto's to discover as I started the organising part, that the software starts back at the same number identification for each of the flash cards...thank god I didn't trash any of the cards before being sure of proper back-up.... I did waste 4CD's and a couple of hours but at least all the photos were safe.
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Post by Sarah Schwartz »

Doug there will be settings somewhere to number consecttively so that it doesnt start all over on each card.

BTW: The kit lens that comes with the D70 or D70s is a very good lens and a good deal but dont get the kit lens if you buy a Canon as that is a low quality lens and not worth it.
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Post by Mike Jackson »

Doug,
I loaded Nikon's capture software (which is much, much different than the Nikon View software that came with my 990) and didn't care for it. I played with it for about 30 minutes and knew I didn't like the new and improved version, but maybe I needed a few hours? I would have been happier with an updated version of Nikon View. ACDsee works much like Nikon View but maybe better. I will work with JPG, PSD, Tiff, and RAW (NEF), and no telling how many others. You can download ACDsee and try it out for 30 days before having to purchase it. I like it a lot.

There should be a setting in your capture software (I deleted Nikon's software so I can't look for it for you) that will allow you to set the import to use the numbering off the camera and not assign new numbers. There is a setting on your camera called File Number Sequence. Click that to ON. I believe it you set that to OFF it will renumber the new images each time starting at 0. I am sure it is in the manual. ACDsee also has a safety switch that will automatically add an extra number or letter to a new file name if it detects a file with the same number already in the current folder.

I am already at just under 7000 photos with this new camera. It will be interesting to see what happens after DSC_9999.

Mike
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Post by Mike Jackson »

I bought two 1 gig Pro Compact flash cards. I can get something like 600 shots on the card in Large, Normal JPG mode and only about 90 in RAW. When on the road a month or two ago, I realized I had about 600 megs of data stored on my 1 gig card, but also realized I had left my second card on my monitor at home. I went to a camera store to get the files downloaded to a CD, but that turned into a disaster of time lost. In the end, neither of the CDs they burned would read on any computer they owned at the store, but luckily I hadn't deleted the files from the compact flash. I had several hours tied up, with no disk. I then tried going to a self service counter at both Target and Walmart, and neither could copy the files onto a CD because of some sort of 120 image limit. I had 380 images and the max number of CDs was three with 120 per disk. Yikes! In the end, I didn't shoot that many more shots and made it home with space on the original 1 gig flash card.

They now make a little downloader/viewer that you can dump your digitial images into. I have heard about them, but haven't seen one work. I am not convinced that is the way to go yet, but worth mentioning.

I hear some people prefer half gig cards so they don't have to worry about overfilling one to the point it won't fit on a CD. Additionally, the theory is if one gets trashed, you don't loose a full 1 gig of data. I like the 1 gig disks so far.

I purchased a Giotto Rocket air squirter and was able to blow off most of the small dust particles. They were only around $12. They also work well for blowing dust off the mirror and lenses.

Lastly, I went ahead and ordered the VR (vibration reduction) telephoto lense from BH Photo. That's a cool lense, too. I shot about 600 photos of buffaloes and wildlife photos a couple of days ago. When I got home, I immediately deleted about half of them, but kept the better shots.

Mike
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and I say...

Post by Doug Bernhardt »

Thanx heaps...will try all the suggestions Sarah and Goldie
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Post by Mike Jackson »

Image

I've been out photographing wildlife quite a bit recently. This one was shot with the new telephoto lense.

Mike
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Post by Sarah Schwartz »

Sounds like you are having fun. Which VR lens did you get and how is the focus speed on it. Asking because I have been seriously toying with a Nikon next camera around. I use the Canon 300L f4 IS and its really a fast focuser

There are some free and pay programs that can recover deleted images on your flash cards if you havent overwritten all of them. Cant remember the names of all of them but a search on image recovery on google or snapfiles would find them. I have one that sells now but I got it when it was free. I could send it to you. Its 688kb
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Post by Mike Jackson »

Image

Sarah,
I bought the 80-400 f4.5 VR lense, after looking at a lot of reviews. I was torn between the 70-200 f2.8 VR and this one, which is supposed to be a little faster. I belive a D2X and the 70-200 VR are rated faster overall than the D70, but both cost more of course.

The 17-70 lense that came with the D70 "outfit" is a nice lense and covers a lot of ground, but I'd someday like to get the 24-120 VR after seeing the benefits of the Vibration Reduction on this big one. Some complain about the 24-120 being "softer", but most of what I read about that indicate it was only on the earliest lenses out of the factory and the newer ones are okay.

I opted for the longer, slower lense because of the nature of my area. Elk, Moose, Buffalo, Deer, Bears, Coyotes, and Wolves tend to be further away and you need the extra distance sometimes. The birds of prey in flight tend to need faster lenses and cameras, but the focal length would have been compromised. When set up on a tripod with the 80-400 VR, the manual recommends taking the VR off, but then on a tripod, it doesn't much matter if I am using an f2.8 or f4.5 for most wildlife subjects or scenes.

There is a guy next door, staying in the valley all August, who has a full line-up of Cannon equipment including their best lenses. His camera body alone weighs more than my camera and long lense together. Same for either of his two long lenses. When combined, his camera is a tank.

Image

The eagle was hand held while in a drift boat on the South Fork of the Snake. The boat was pitching and rocking, along with the rowing action of the boatman, so getting a photo like this at about 300 mm withou the VR would have been pretty tough. This photo is cropped down a bit from the original shot.

Hope that helps!
Mike
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Post by Raymond Chapman »

I guess the eagle didn't believe in the catch and release policy.
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Post by Sarah Schwartz »

Thanks for info Mike. Yes the 2.8 or less lenses are both too expensive and too heavy for me. My 10D with 300f4 is getting to be too heavy lately. The 70Ds with the kit lens is very good combo. I have some pics i took at the camera store with it and it did great stopping fast moving traffic outside. Those ar nice bird shots and I do love Nikon color
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