dslr.ws

Digicam Review recently posted a review of the Nikon D40x DSLR camera, and wound up giving it a rating of “recommended.”

Interestingly, they state that the camera is fast to power on and be ready for shooting, but then state that the speed is 0.9 seconds, which sounds extremely slow to me for a DSLR:

The camera is very quick to switch on and take photos, from off, to taking a photo in 0.9 seconds.

Maybe that includes the time to take the photo itself, including auto focus, metering, and all that? They don’t specify, but 0.9 seconds just to turn on a digital SLR is extremely slow, if you ask me. You probably didn’t ask me, though, so I’ll just ignore that point and continue.

Most people seem to think that Nikon is one of the best DSLR manufacturers when it comes to ergonomics, but this review does have some negative comments about the D40x in that area:

The layout of buttons and controls could be better, or rather, there seems to be a limited number of buttons, and quick access to the most commonly used options and features is sometimes difficult as most options seem hidden in menus. There is one function button that can be customised, for example, so you can set ISO, however, if you also want quick access to White Balance, then you will need to use the back screen or menu system. It also seems a shame that the Info button can’t be customised, as it seems to serve little purpose.

That said, he describes the camera as solidly built and easy to hold despite the smaller-than-average size.

There’s an ISO noise comparison between the Nikon D40x, the Olympus E-510, and the Canon 400D (the Digital Rebel XTi), all 10 megapixel cameras. The white balance is different between the three cameras, which makes it a little odd to compare for noise (e.g., something that’s a strong blue color in the E-510 images is white in the D40x images, and a purplish blue in the 400D images, meaning that blue channel noise will be tougher to see in the blue cast images than in the D40x images.)

The reviewer does like the noise performance:

Noise from the Nikon D40x is very low, lower than the Olympus E-510, and even slightly lower than the Canon EOS 400D, the Nikon also provides a full ISO range from ISO100 to ISO3200 – with the highest setting usable in some situations. Detail also remains quite good upto ISO800. At ISO1600 and ISO3200 detail is reduced, and there does seem to be some reduction in colour saturation, especially as ISO3200.

The main negatives that the review finds were the aforementioned ergonomic issues, the fact that not all Nikon lenses are supported due to the lack of a focus motor, and the confusing lack of exposure compensation bracketing (which is a pretty glaring omission of what is normally a standard digital camera feature.)

Personally, I’m using automatic exposure bracketing for quick HDR image acquisition (more in a future post, perhaps) and would be surprised to buy a digital SLR camera only to discover that it was missing a pretty basic feature like that. So, for me, the Nikon D40x isn’t the right camera to buy. For you, that’s your call.

A few scattered DSLR rumors for you this New Year’s Eve day.

Nikon D60

First is the Nikon D60. The rumors say it’ll be arriving in spring of 2008. These rumors supposedly come from someone who leaked the news about the Nikon D3 before the official announcement, and so are slightly more believable than what some random person with no credibility posts on the Internet.

These rumors are being paired up with news that the Nikon D40x is being discontinued, and the theory is the D60 (or whatever it’ll wind up being called) would be the replacement for the D40x.

Canon 450D

Canon is scheduled to make some big announcements in their DSLR line in January, and this rumor of a Canon 450D (which would be a successor to the Canon Digital Rebel XTi) fit with that.

According to these rumors, it would have a 10.1 megapixel sensor (not full frame), the Canon DIGIC III processor, offer 14-bit RAW images, have a 2.5″ LCD display with live view, better autofocus, support for sRAW, a dust removal system, and burst mode up to 5 fps.

The rumored date for the rumored camera is January 24th (no big surprise what with PMA at that point.)

Pentax K200D

This one looks like the most trustworthy rumor of the bunch, see all the photos over at Photography Bay. That’s an insane amount of image chopping if it’s fake.

The rumored specs — which didn’t come attached to the photos, so they might be a little more suspect — are that the K200D will have a 10 megapixel Sony image sensor, 3 fps burst mode (a maximum of 10 shots in RAW, no limit with JPEGs), 11-point auto focus, and a larger LCD than the K100D (size unspecified in the rumors I could find.)

Big heaping salt blocks should be used with any of this news, but I’m passing it along because what kind of irresponsible web journalist would I be if I didn’t? Not a very good one, I can promise you that.

Do you know Scott Kelby? He’s the editor and publisher of both Photoshop User Magazine and Layers magazine, and is president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). He recently wrote about his new Nikon D300, and it turns out that he’s kind of totally in love with the camera.

Why?

Well, there’s a long list of reasons in his post, but here they are in a nutshell (a special holiday nut’s shell, if you wish):

• The 51-point AF, which he says is “much better, faster, and more accurate than the D200′s.”
• The Live View. Like me, he dismissed it as something as would never use (ok, I put Live View in the “hardly ever use” category, but still close). He loves the white balance preview that you get, however, where you can scroll through the WB settings and see their effect live on the LCD preview.
• Likes the large shooting setting display on the rear LCD, saying it’s easier to read (especially when the camera’s on a tripod) than the standard top-panel LCD.
• Lower noise: “I have found that to me, the noise level when shooting at 800ISO on a D300 is like shooting at 400 ISO on a D200. That’s an appreciable difference, but I’ve been so spoiled at shooting at 6400 ISO on a D3 (whose noise looks more like the D300 at 800 ISO, to me anyway). So, lower noise for sure, but not D3-ish low noise.” I’m always a fan of low noise at high ISO.
• A few usability praises for the dials, including their flexibility to assign them to do what you want.
• The nice LCD
• Improved auto white balance: “In fact, I think it’s easily the best Auto White Balance I’ve ever used.” That sounds pretty sweet.
• HDMI output, loving the display on a high definition TV. I need someone to buy me an HD TV and a D300 (I’d also accept a Nikon D3) so I can evaluate the HDMI display for myself.

And let’s not forget that biggie, image quality, which — big surprise — Scott also loves:

The color is outstanding (better than any Nikon I’ve ever used, and the color rendering is nearly on par with the D3’s). This camera just produces beautiful images, plain and simple, and if you want really saturated colors, you can pump up the saturation with some amazing results (perfect for the Velvia freak deep inside us all).

He does have a few negative points about the Nikon D300, such as a few rows of information preventing him from seeing the full image on the full screen when reviewing images. It sounds like there’s no LCD display mode that’s just the image with nothing else? That’s kind of surprising. Am I misunderstanding his gripe?

He’d also like a full-screen histogram-only display, and would like still lower noise, although it sounds like he might have been spoiled by too much shooting with the Nikon D3. Who knew that using a D3 too much would be a bad thing?

He thinks the D300′s battery grip is clunkier than the D200′s was, he doesn’t like the Focus Mode selector button (it gets accidentally switched a lot). And to shoot tethered you need to buy Nikon Camera Control Pro 2 at around $160, while Canon shooters get free tethered software. And to top it off, the Nikon software doesn’t work with Mac OS Leopard.

But in the end, he loves it, and it hard-pressed to think of any reasons for him to keep using his Nikon D2X over the D300, and as a result he’s selling the D2X. In short, he really likes the camera.

Be sure to check out Scott’s full post about the camera, as well as all the comments (48 of them so far.)

Jeff Kellor at DCResource stayed up until 3:00 am posting his review of the new Nikon D300. What does he say about it? Let’s find out.

First off, the battery life is excellent. You should get 1,000 shots on one charge, a huge improvement over the Nikon D200′s estimated 340 shots per charge, and a decent improvement over the Canon 40D’s 800 shots. Assuming you shoot more like a regular person than a CIPA test — for example, not using a flash — you should get even better results. This is assuming you’re not using live view, though.

He likes the magnesium allow build: “the D300 doesn’t let you forget that it’s an $1800 camera.” He also says that the grip is well-sized.

The live view sounds decent, aside from the slow contrast-based auto focus system and the lack of a live histogram:

So how does it look? Quite good, in my opinion. The view is bright, and incredibly sharp on the 3-inch LCD. Low light visibility isn’t great with the screen at its default brightness, but it gets better if you max it out (there’s a shortcut in live view mode to do quickly adjust the brightness). In both of the live view modes, you can zoom in on an area of the frame to make sure that your subject is properly focused. While you can preview white balance in live view mode, exposure is not simulated (the image always looks the same, regardless of the shutter speed or aperture). On a related note, there’s no live histogram available here, which some of the other live view D-SLRs offer.

Also, you can’t use live view and the self-timer function at the same time. That seems like a weird and arbitrary limitation, but there you have it.

One interesting bit to note is that the continuous shooting speed drops considerably if you’re shooting 14-bit RAW NEF files. In this review, shooting RAW, JPEGs, or RAW+JPEG ran at about 5.9 fps shooting speed (this is without the battery grip, which should bump that up to 8 fps.) However, shooting 14-bit RAW dropped that burst speed down to just 2.5 fps.

I’ve always been jealous of Nikon’s auto ISO function, which my Canon Digital Rebel XT doesn’t have, and which seems like a basic photography control that you want on a digital camera. The D300′s sounds easy and covers what you want it to do:

The D300 lets you set the ISO manually, ranging from 200 to 3200, with low (ISO 100) and high (ISO 6400) options available. It also has an auto ISO mode available. You set the slowest shutter speed and the highest sensitivity that you want the camera to use, and it does the rest.

On to ISO noise performance. The D300 gives a very respectable performance in the night test, even if it can’t quite hit the ridiculous ISO levels of it’s bigger brother, the Nikon D3:

You can see some minute amounts of noise at ISO 400 and 800, but it’s barely noticeable. Noise starts to pick up at ISO 1600, reducing your print size to small or medium, though you may be able to go larger if you shoot in RAW and use noise reduction software. At ISO 3200, the image has a kind of blotchy appearance from noise and presumably noise reduction. You may be able to squeeze out a small print at this sensitivity with a little help from NR software. There’s too much detail lost at ISO 6400 (H1.0) for the photo to be of much use.

NIght shots are hard to compare (since conditions are never consistent), but I’m thinking that the D300 did better than the Canon EOS-40D in this test. Both the D300 and the 40D wiped the floor with the Sony Alpha DSLR-A700, which isn’t so hot in low light at high sensitivities.

The studio ISO noise test they do also shows the D300 coming through with flying colors:

This is why I love digital SLRs — the D300 produces buttery-smooth, noise-free images through ISO 800. At ISO 1600 do we start to see some noise, but it’s barely there. At ISO 3200 the noise becomes noticeable, but it’s still quite low overall. That trend continues at ISO 6400, but the results are definitely still usable, especially if you’re shooting RAW. Just send those photos through noise reduction software and you’ll get yourself some nice 4 x 6 inch prints. Once again, I think the D300 beats both the 40D and the A700 in terms of high ISO performance — and I think you’ll agree if you compare the test photos.

Jeff mentions that the D300′s photos are soft out-of-the-camera, which isn’t unusual for a DSLR, especially Nikon. You still have a lot of detail in the files, though, and a little unsharp mask in Photoshop will bring them out. Or, just bump up the in-camera sharpening level, if you don’t like to do it on the computer.

The exposure seems to often be on the bright side, which is something to keep in mind:

Another issue I found is that the camera seemed to overexpose by 1/3 to 2/3 of a stop fairly often, so I quickly became familiar with the D300′s bracketing feature.

Or just shoot with -2/3 exposure compensation dialed in, and hope you’re not losing too much dynamic range at the high end of the histogram.

Interestingly, he reports that he couldn’t see any difference between the 12-bit and 14-bit RAW files:

One of the selling points of the D300 is to record 14-bit RAW files, which allows the camera to capture more color data. I took a photo of the test scene at both 12 and 14-bits, stared at them for awhile, and couldn’t see a difference. If you want to see for yourself, then feel free to download the 12-bit and 14-bit RAW files.

I haven’t had a chance to download the originals myself to look at, but I’ll be doing that soon, and would be interested to hear anyone else’s opinions about it; feel free to leave comments below.

In the end, he’s very pleased with the camera, calling it a strong competitor to the Canon 40D. A few negative points that he mentions include:

• Images are soft at default settings; camera tends to overexpose
• Battery grip (and proper battery configuration) required for 8 fps continuous shooting
• No exposure preview, live histogram, or self-timer in live view mode
• Sluggish contrast detect AF in tripod live view mode
• Continuous shooting burst rate drops to 2.5 fps when shooting 14-bit NEFs
• Flimsy door over memory card slot
• Remote capture software not included (Canon and Sony bundle theirs)
• Most expensive midrange D-SLR

There you have it. Be sure to check out the full review for all the details and a bunch of full resolution sample photos.