Nikon D70 Praise Thread

"Only" D100

I have a Nikon D100 for nearly two years now and I am very satisfied with the camera.

Battery life is good (never had to charge on my New Zealand trip - 6 weeks - 500 pics), so don't worry about battery.
Use CF 256MB and Microdrive 1GB, both work well. I hope you have enough memory for a longer trip, because with high resolution even 1 GB is "only" 300 pics.

Lens... 28 - 70 mm... depends what you want to put on picture. Forget cities and impressive landscape, where you need a wide angle. I use mainly a very good Nikon 24-85 1:2.8-4, but I found myself often in the position being unable to put everything I want onto the picture - sad isn't it.

Otherwise my camera is good quality and lots of fun to have.

pdpfilms said:

Hmm...
...
EDIT: what about the Nikkor 24-85mm lens?
Or a 17-35mm lens?

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Okay, it also depends from your budget... I assume you want something for 500 $. From the two you have given the link I would choose the Sigma.
If you don't mind spending more money...
Nikon 17-35 1/2.8D ED-IF.

If you know a good camera store, go there and try some lenses (I did that), it gives you more of an idea what you can do with the lense (specially with a digital SLR and a laptop, you get instant answers).

Looks like my one, but it was more expensive in England (500 £).

Good luck.

Lenses

pdpfilms said:

What are the benefits of the Nikon 17-35mm versus the Sigma 17-35mm?
They both have a max aperture of 2.8.... but i have no idea what all of those acronyms stand for..(ED-IF AF-S)
The Nikon looks much bigger...

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Okay, here we go...
AF: Auto focus
ED: Extra low Dispersion, glass element minimises chromatic aberration, provides higher resolution and superior contrast.
IF: Internal focusing, ermits fast AF operation and closer focusing distance.

The Nikon DX lenses are specially build for Nikon Digital SLRs:
Nikon 17-55 1/2.8 ED-IF DX

You may want to look at Tamron lenses. They have a better warranty than many other lenses out there, and performance can meet the manufacturers lens.

Here is info on their 17-35:

http://www.penncamera.com/store/view.cfm?id=4908

On on the Sigma 17-35:

http://www.penncamera.com/store/view.cfm?id=5171

Another choice for wide-angle vistas at this point is the Sigma 15-30:

http://www.penncamera.com/store/view.cfm?id=4035

Though with the 1.5x crop factor, I personally find that the 24 to 25mm coverage to be great. And that can be handled with the 17-35 range.

One side benefit is that if you go with a lens that can be used on both film and digital, is that you can get extreme wide-angles with a cheap 35mm body.

No Sigma for my D70

I bought a D70 the day they were released here.
I bougt the Sigma 17-35 2.8 along straight away.
I had to return it the day after I got it.
The Mirror kept locking itself up.
The display showed An F_ _. As if I wanted to clean my chip.
When I tried to take the lense of the mirror fell back in place. Next time I tried it did it again.
I went to the store and we tried a Nikon lense 18-35 3.5 (I know its not as sensitive but the 2.8 Nikon were out of my league) Wich worked fine.
I have used it a lot since then and lately the Mirror locked up again. Only two times so far, but its enough for me. I am going to mail about this to Nikon. I am not shure if its the lense or the camera. Maybe the lense is build too far out or the mirror is too far out, I don't know if they phiscally touch? It could also be just the chip doing his own thing.


Other than that it works great. The battery is really good. You can give it a full charge in three hours wich is really quick in case you get near any civilisation. I would suggest you take another card along just in case the one dies.

Nikon lenses are really expensive but if you can afford one go for it. I tried Sigma's on other camers D30 and D10's and they are slower, louder, and they got that special plastic feel. But they are real good value for the money. Your call here.

...back to the camera itself. I LOVE mine. The battery life is AWESOME. I've probably taken around 500 pictures with mine and never had to charge the battery after the initial charge (more than a month ago). I got the Outfit version with the 18-70mm lens. Its an awesome lens, I highly recommend it, although I haven't done any landscapes with it, but 18mm should be able to handle them. The Outfit version is only $300 more than just the body, so its a pretty inexpensive lens (as DX lenses go). The lens also has the advantage of being able to be used in auto or manual focus without flipping the AF/M switch. Very cool. Everything about this camera is basically perfect. I have had zero operational problems and only one unfocused picture using auto focus. If you have any more questions, I'll be happy to answer them!

More on lenses... I have done extensive research on more lenses for my camera, and found some nice 28mm-300mm lenses. That would be very useful if you got a non-zoom or minimal zoom landscape lens as it would give you range from normal vision to (very close) zoom.

Sigma 28-300mm
Nikon 28-200mm

You can find more if you go to BH Photo and search for " nikon 300mm " then sort by price. I have found that BH Photo has very good prices because they import lenses from Japan (where many of them are made anyway) instead of just selling the USA versions.

Nikon D70 experience

Here we go!

I have had the D70 for the last two months. All i can say is it is a GREAT camera! I have extensively tried everything, all settings, programs, and an external SB 800 flash as well!

1. If you have never used a DSLR or SLR, there is a learning curve involved, I am not saying that you can't just set the camera to auto and start shooting... you can, but to truly extract all of the excellence out of the camera, you need to know what modes do what, and what modes excel in what lighting situations. Outside is easy, indoors with flash can be tricky at times.

2. As a kit, the lens is EXCELLENT! 18-70mm = equivilent of appr 28-105mm Great for landscapes.

3. Get a 1 GB CF card. You can benefit from the hi speed cards from Lexar but for a long trip you will need to get something like your iPod or a laptop to offload your images.

If you would like to delve into more peoples feedback check out http://www.dpreview.com

Hope that helps

Just wanted to add one more thing... The RAW image format that Nikon uses (NEF) is essentially a zipped RAW file. As simple as this sounds, it takes from 30 sec to 1 min to open one of those files on my 1ghz Powerbook in either Photoshop or Nikon Editor (iPhoto doesn't support them at all). The JPEGs are of course standard and almost instant to open.

For a lot of good commentary on this camera visit this site.

I love it. Get the outfit version with the 18-70mm Zoom-Nikkor lens. It's well worth it. Excellent for macro and wide-angle shots, and portraits are good too. I also bought the 70-300mm telephoto lens, incredibly good for long-distance shots. Battery life is excellent, upwards of three days while shooting entirely in RAW and filling up a 1 GB SanDisk CF card. The battery indicator isn't so great however; it shows 3/3 bars until about an hour before it's gone to the point of being unable to take any pictures. And the NEF files are really a pain to work with. Other than that, I love it.

PS. There's no "auto" for ISO, so make sure you don't ruin a day of pictures by leaving it on 800 or 1600 from last night's shots.

GeeYouEye said:

PS. There's no "auto" for ISO, so make sure you don't ruin a day of pictures by leaving it on 800 or 1600 from last night's shots.

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Don't know about your camera, but mine does have an ISO Auto mode. Check your manual or Nikon's support site.