Nikon D100: Everything Old is New Again
Caution: Dirt Road Ahead
If you’re considering the D100 for work in particularly grimy environments, think again. When you shoot with 35mm film, the imaging surface is exchanged for a new one after every shot. Many photographers are painfully familiar with the effects of dust, hair and small bits of grime on an otherwise perfect negative, but at least these effects are limited to a single frame, or at worst a roll of film.
In the D100, the CCD and its extremely delicate filter are fixed in place behind the reflex mirror, and unlike a frame of film, this surface is expected to last the life of the camera. Nikon recommends professional servicing when the filter needs cleaning, and in fact, you can’t put the camera’s mirror into lock-up mode to access the film plane without plugging in the optional AC adapter. Your choices for cleaning are either pay Nikon for the AC adapter, which you’re not likely to need in any other circumstance, or pay a service shop to clean the camera for you. (Woe to the photographer who needs to clean his CCD in the field.) Keep in mind that each time you change lenses you are opening your camera and potentially allowing dust into the CCD chamber.
I had used my D100 for exactly three days, changing lenses maybe a dozen times, before a small hair stuck to the chip, resulting a prominent squiggly black mark near the center of every subsequent frame. One look at the camera’s CCD, which is surrounded by a slightly raised rim, confirms that Nikon designed the camera without end-user cleaning in mind. I expect that this serious flaw, more than any other, will lead to the D100’s eventual re-design.
Image Quality
The image quality from the D100 is excellent, with true-to-life color saturation, contrast and detail. The D100 tends to capture images a bit on the soft side, which can easily be corrected in Photoshop, or by changing the level of automatic sharpening through the camera’s menus. Nikon is very conservative in its in-camera image adjustments, which I prefer, since I usually want to do fine image adjustment in Photoshop, rather than having the camera balance my images for me.
If you shoot in Nikon’s 12-bit-per-channel raw NEF format, the camera captures more data than you can display on your computer monitor, meaning there’s a lot more detail to work with when you do bring pictures into Photoshop or another image editor. Shooting in this format lets you recover from a bad white-balance setting, for example. Nikon’s NEF processing software, Nikon Capture 3.5, is not included with the camera (several online retailers sell it for less than $200). On the other hand, you might want to consider the third-party replacements, including Bibble ($99) or the $39.95 Qimage Pro , both of which offer some comparable features, and whose relative advantages are the subject of much discussion in the professional photography discussion boards. (For more Nikon camera-compatible software and add-ons, see “Hot Nikon D1x Accessories.”)
As with most slide films, Nikon’s CCD is prone to sacrificing image detail in highlights while doing a good job of capturing detail in dark shadow areas. That means that in images with broad exposure ranges (a person with bright sun on his face, for example) it’s a good idea to under-expose your subject by roughly 1/3 stop to preserve detail at both ends of the spectrum.
As with other two-sides-of-the-fence discussions, the debate as to whether Canon or Nikon produces better images rages on. I can only say that I’ve seen amazing photographs from both cameras and, well, they’re both really, really good. If you’ve got lenses for one or the other, that fact will do far more to influence your buying decision than the quality of images produced by either camera. Studio photographers lean towards Canon’s equipment due to the better flash-exposure control.
Conclusion
Nikon’s D100 is miles ahead of any point-and-shoot digital camera in terms of its breadth of functionality and creative picture-taking control and performance. It’s not as sturdy as Nikon’s “pro” cameras, particularly given the dangers posed by dirt on the CCD, and it has a few problems compared to professional film SLRs, including the lens magnification factor, and poor automatic flash performance. But overall, the D100, along with the Canon D60, to which it is remarkably similar, is a revolution in photography. It comes very close to duplicating the control and performance offered by top-quality film SLRs, while approaching the price of the best point-and-shoot digitals. The D100 is a camera that will convince many fence sitters to switch to digital once-and-for-all.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on January 28, 2003
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