3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
A great camera for the price
Date of Review: Aug 12, 2003
The Bottom Line: Overall it's a pretty good pro camera, but it's a absolutely great amatuer camera!
First of all it's a great camera and definitely the most camera you can buy right now for the price. The body is light and smaller than the D1 (that is without the MB-D100 vertical grip). The shutter is also much quieter than some of the previous Nikon bodies.
The camera's controls and operation is much similar to the D1 model. It features Manual, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Program mode. The white balance can be set to Auto, manual presets and custom. The best part of the body is the preview display. The design makes it very fast to not only view the shot image, but to zoom in to better check focus. The controls make it easy to get to the image zoom mode without going through inconvenient menus. The battery life on the body far surpasses the D1. Although there is a hot shoe, the camera also features a built in flash which is nice in a pinch. It shoots a 6 megapixel file with options from basic high compression jpg to raw. It doesn't have a PC socket, but one can be attached made specifically for digital cameras. Also, as expected there's no shutter lag that cheaper cameras have.
cons: It's so light, it's almost too light without the vertical grip. The grip really adds stability especially for those used to shooting with the D1, F5, or F4. The ISO controls are placed on the shooting mode dial, so in order to change ISO you need to change out of shooting mode which can slow things up a bit. The motor drive only goes up to 2 frames per second...so while this camera shoots a pretty big file, it's not the best choice for a sports photographer. Another con for the sports shooter is that the buffer only takes 6 images max. For all other general shooting, it's a great camera.
