Nikon D100: Everything Old is New Again

Sean Wagstaff

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The Nikon D100, the latest in Nikon’s line of digital SLR cameras, offers photographers frustrated with the limitations of point-and-shoot digital-picture-taking a new lease on the art of photography. At $2,000 street price, the D100, similar to Canon’s EOS D60 (see “Canon EOS D60: More Pixels, Less Bucks, Great Camera“), is about twice the price of the best digital point-and-shoots. That’s not too much to ask for a camera that gives back all those things digital technology had taken away, including: bright through-the-lens viewfinders; fast, reliable focusing; fast, multi-frame shooting; a system of interchangeable lenses and accessories; and uncompromising exposure control. For very serious amateurs, or professionals seeking feature rich, lightweight SLR, the D100 is a compelling offering.

Full-Bodied SLR
If you’re used to the convenience of a point-and-shoot camera that fits in a coin purse, then the bulk and heft of the D100 with a fast zoom lens attached will come as a shock. On the other hand, anyone used to shooting film with 35mm SLRs will find that the D100 fits nicely in the hand and is a comfortable, well-balanced shooting platform (see figure 1). The body is made of plastic, unlike Nikon’s professional digital and film SLRs, but is sturdily built and up to the daily rigor of all but combat and expedition outdoors work. The good, sticky rubber grip adds to the overall feel of quality.

An optional vertical grip and battery holder provides extended battery life (which is rarely needed) and a connection for an optional remote control module, yet adds considerable bulk.

Setting up the D100 for shooting is quick and easy. The camera comes with an EN-EL3 NiMH battery and rapid charger that delivers a full charge in about two or three hours. Images are stored on a Compact Flash card, which is not included. For this review and for most of my shooting, I opted to use a 1GB IBM Microdrive, which holds 316 high-resolution (3,000-by-2,000-pixel), Fine Quality JPEGs. For the very highest-quality applications, you’re better off shooting in NEF, Nikon’s raw 12-bit/color uncompressed format. However, these images occupy about three times the memory, dropping the drive’s image capacity to about 100 images. Also, rapid shooting is adversely affected by using NEF, since the camera takes a proportionately longer time to write the image files to disk between shots.

Like all pro-level SLRs, the D100 is sold as a body-only. To take any pictures, you’ll need one or more Nikon-mount lenses. For shutterbugs like myself, this is no problem if you already have a bag full of lenses for your older Nikon autofocus film cameras.

Lens Limitations
Lens selection for the Nikon, as with Canon’s cameras, is a point of endless discussion and controversy in the digital-photography community. The D100 uses a 6-Megapixel CCD imaging chip that’s about 40 percent smaller than a 35mm film frame. If you imagine the light coming from the lens and falling on the imaging plane as a circle, this means that more of that circle falls outside the edges of the rectangular CCD and is cropped away. This results in the often-mentioned magnification factor of the D100, which is approximately 1.5 times the rated focal length of the lens. In practice, this means an 80-200mm Nikon lens has the field of view of a 120-300mm zoom lens. Another way to think of it is as though you shot the picture with the 80-200mm lens, then cropped it down to the field of view of the 120-300mm lens.

Unfortunately, this also means that wide-angle lenses are magnified, so a 17-35mm zoom lens has the effective field of view of 25-50mm lens. Getting a boost from your telephoto lens is tolerable, and may even be seen as a benefit. For example, my 60mm Micro Nikkor macro lens achieves an effective length of 90mm and comes very close to the portrait and close-up taking qualities of Nikon’s much more expensive 105mm Micro on a 35mm camera. On the other hand, anyone who has paid a pile of money for a fast, wide-angle lens for shooting panoramic vistas will be unhappy to have it suddenly behaving like overweight mid-length optics.

Nikon has announced plans to address this problem with the introduction of a new series of DX lenses. These are designed specifically around Nikon’s digital SLRs and their diminutive imaging chip. Because the imaging area is smaller, these lenses can be smaller, lighter, and at least potentially cheaper to manufacture than equivalent 35mm lenses (pricing has not been announced, so it’s not clear that Nikon will pass the savings on to consumers). The first such lens will be a 12-24mm f/4 zoom with Nikon’s remarkably fast silent-wave focusing motor. It will have the equivalent field of view of an 18-35mm lens on a 35mm film camera.

While this is an obvious and ideal solution, DX lenses won’t be backward compatible with Nikon’s 35mm film cameras, since they won’t be capable of filling a 35mm film frame. If the switch does result in smaller, lighter, and cheaper lenses of comparable quality, however, I have no qualms about Nikon sticking with the smaller imaging area in its D-Series cameras and thereby permanently diverging from the 35mm standard.

For anyone considering using third-party lenses with the D100, take heart. Because the camera effectively crops the edges of the image area captured by any 35mm-format lens, the tell-tale edge-falloff that results in darkened edges in images shot with some cheaper after-market lenses is far less of a worry. With the D100, you’ll always be shooting through the middle six-tenths of the glass — the sweet spot of any lens — making a reasonable case for choosing good-quality third-party lenses over Nikon’s flawless, but high-priced professional lenses.

(Of note to potential buyers just entering the SLR market is that Canon has recently introduced a new digital flagship, the EOS D1s SLR, with a full-size 35mm CMOS sensor. This hints that Canon’s small-sensored cameras are probably just a temporary stopgap measure and not the ultimate future for Nikon’s main competitor.)

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