EOS 1000D and Nikon D700 in hand

[David Kilpatrick]

I'm testing both of them this week - the 1000D has just gone back, replaced by the D700 this morning. If anyone wants any info or comments in due course, just ask. I will not post a review of these cameras on photoclubalpha, both articles will appear in the British Journal.

David

[Dr. Harout]

Questions? Maybe I have, maybe I don't.
I am happy with the A mount, and I will not get back to Nikon. As for Canon, it was, it is and will always be out of question.
Anyway, your final verdict really interests me. Honestly yours will be quite objective.

[ianmiddy]

...replaced by the D700 this morning...

Have they given you any glass to test with it, David, or are you using your own ?

Cheers

IDM

[Greg Beetham]

I'm testing both of them this week - the 1000D has just gone back, replaced by the D700 this morning. If anyone wants any info or comments in due course, just ask. I will not post a review of these cameras on photoclubalpha, both articles will appear in the British Journal.

David

Hmm I wonder how the 1000D will go in the market place? at first glance one would think it'll interfere with sales of the 450D but maybe not as it's a fair bit chaeper and two MP less..it's probably aimed straight at the A200 and D60, but is it as good feature wise as the A200?
The new D700 is a cam I think will sell ok here in Oz to the Nikon guys, it's priced at $2,500 less than the D3 here and has the improved option of not having an embedded grip as well...I wonder when Canon are going to answer all this Nikon activity with their 5D Mk11 upgrade? interesting times indeed.
Greg
ps Perhaps your son should have waited for the D700 David, but then, who knew it was coming?

[01af]

After having been a Minolta user for 30 years and with two Dynax 7D bodies and more than a dozen AF lenses, now I am very seriously contemplating to switch to Nikon. I love the 7D's ergonomy, and their six megapixels are still fine for me. But the inaccuracy of the auto-focus is driving me nuts. And responsiveness could be better, too.

A few weeks ago I ordered a Sony A700 ... and sent it back immediately due to back-focus. Duh ...

The only---I repeat: the ONLY---reason that currently keeps me from actually taking the plunge towards Nikon is in-body image stabilization ... or lack thereof. I learned to really appreciate the presence of a reliable stabilizer which works with all my lenses, including 20-year-old. On the other hand, what is an image stabilizer good for when focus is always off?

And the comparison of the A700's features to the D300's brings tears to my eyes. Why on earth can't the Sony be as serious a camera as the Nikon? The D300 is faster, has better high-ISO image quality, has user-operable per-lens fine-adjustment of the AF, has grid lines in viewfinder, has 100 % viewfinder coverage, has life-view which can be used for super-accurate manual focusing, has real mirror lock-up (as opposed to 2-sec mirror pre-fire), fits a wide range of Zeiss ZF prime lenses, body and (!) Nikkor lenses are weather-sealed, and more. The only point in favour of the A700 is SSS ... well, and the A mount which matches my lenses.

And now, the D700 ... basically a D300 on steroids. Nikon passes Sony to the left and to the right hands down. Still no A900. And I am afraid the A900, when it arrives eventually, will have a great sensor in a disappointing package ... as usual, I am tempted to say.

David, didn't your son Richard switch to Nikon recently? Does he miss an in-body stabilizer? What about focus accuracy? Is he happy with his choice, or does he have any regrets? Do NEF files process neatly with non-Nikon raw converters, namely Camera Raw? I keep hearing about problems here ...

Dr. Harout, you won't get back to Nikon? So you used to have Nikon? What didn't you like specifically?

-- Olaf

[Philip]

David, you wrote in the Feb/March editon of F2, when comparing the Oly E-3 and Nkn D3, that what you would like would be a D3 sensor in a D300 body. Nkn have now delivered exactly this in the D700 (we assume), and I am very tempted to switch after 25 years of Minolta use (despite a huge investment in glass), so am really looking forward to yor insights. What are your initial thoughts on quality - image and build, and have Nkn crippled the high ISO function to protect D3 sales?

Philip

[Dr. Harout]

Dr. Harout, you won't get back to Nikon? So you used to have Nikon? What didn't you like specifically? -- Olaf

That was in the film and manual focus era. I had a F3 and a FM2n and some good lenses.
When switching to digital I had to make a choice. Finally I stopped on Sony Alpha (the choice in fact was between Sony and Pentax). Why? Well simply because they both had in camera anti shake (one of the best things), decent lenses, and almost all innovations were attributed to them (of course you do understand that in case of Sony it's the Minolta legacy).
My father was a camera/lens/flash repairer, and before that he was a photoreporter. Whenever talking about image quality he always referred to some brands specially Minolta, Zeiss, Contax... and always advised me not to believe in advertisements and propaganda and to stay away from Nk & Cn. Well, being young I went on with Nikon...
My explanation could be quite long, but instead look at this site and read this article: http://www.mhohner.de/sony-minolta/a700.php
Let me put it this way: a rich and famous surgeon from a rich country deals with 100 patients and 99 of them die while another surgeon from an "unheard" country deals with the same number, from which 99 live and just one dies. What would people say?
Well, for the first case: "all had no chance of survival, but you see, he saved that patient, wow, he's wonderful"
and for the second it will be: "all those patients would've get well anyway, but you see that jackass killed that poor patient".
The meaning: don't believe in everything said, Cnn and Nkn are just names, well advertised, sometimes even very aggressively.
I might be wrong, but everyone might mention about problems with Sony, but oppositely most will keep silence with C or N

[mike2008]

Hi, I'm very interested in your impressions so far of the IQ from the D700, and the AF system; any initial findings?

[David Kilpatrick]

The IQ is identical to the D3, which I have used more of course, and despite the extremely low high ISO noise, it is not as noise-free at 400 or 800 as people would like to think. It's just not very noisy as you go up to 1600, then 3200. 6400 has fairly strong noise actually, but more like 1600 on other cams. At 12,800 an 25,600 you get real loss of colour values as well as a very soft image (detail is there, but it's a bit like the A700 at 6400).

So far the focus system has been fine but I notice the previous user (Nikon staff probably) has set it to centre spot, not the 51-zone wide area. I actually found that a nuisance on the D300 and D3, and restricted the area to the 15-zone mode. The claims about tracking randomly moving subjects using the wide zone sensors are about as realistic as the claims made for predictive focus. If you replicate the lab model of movement used to set it up, it probably works well. On real live subjects it is marginally less reliable than prefocusing and timing one shot in manual focus mode, using the human brain to work out were the subject is going!

This focus system tends to select close detail in preference to further away detail, and I have already found that with the 51-zone mode enabled on the D300, where it fills the frame, you end up with sharp foregrounds and badly focused subjects all too often. It is not as bad on the D3/D700. The Alpha 900 should be free from this problem in the same way, because the new sensor offers 'window' modes. This will certainly mean a 1.5X crop (maybe even an auto crop if it recognises DT lenses) and could mean other crops, like 5 x 4 shape (the Nikon 12 megapixel sensor can do that), 16:9, and 2X. That either means having focus sensors which are turned off if they fall outside a crop area, or all the sensors have to fit in the crop area, as they do on the D3/D700.

David

[01af]

... I notice the previous user (Nikon staff probably) has set it to centre spot, not the 51-zone wide area.

I guess that's the first thing I'd do when setting up the camera, too. Clearly, having 51 AF sensors is 50 too many. With my Dynax 7D, I am never using anything but the central AF sensor in AF-S mode. Switch to wide-area AF and AF-C mode, and inevitably you're getting shots that are focused all over the place but hardly ever where they should be.

Leaving the decision to the camera where to focus at is similar to having the camera fire the shutter when it detects people smiling. I never understood why people are so keen on having more and more AF sensors ...

-- Olaf

[David Kilpatrick]

David, didn't your son Richard switch to Nikon recently? Does he miss an in-body stabilizer? What about focus accuracy? Is he happy with his choice, or does he have any regrets? Do NEF files process neatly with non-Nikon raw converters, namely Camera Raw? I keep hearing about problems here ...
-- Olaf

Richie is not too pleased he spent that money on a D3 and they didn't warn him about the D700, but in fairness he got a journalist's discount so a very fair price. He is using manual focus a lot, and lenses like the Voigtlander 58mm f1.2. When he does use AF, he is often working at wide apertures because he likes very limited depth of field - or he's using the 14-24mm, the only Nikon lens he has. Since he just bumps the speed up to 6400, anti-shake does not worry him. He is mainly photographing people who need a fast shutter speed in low light to freeze expressions and action, and anti-shake can not do that.

He has never worked with a camera using in-body stabilisation, his other camera system is Sigma - DP-1, SD9, SD10, SD14, various lenses including their 18-200mm OS. That is his only stabilised lens. Previously he shot using 645 rollfilm rangefinders out of preference. But then, he's just ordered a new Citroen C6. Apparently he is the only person in the country buying one this month He always makes eccentric choices.

David

[David Kilpatrick]

David, you wrote in the Feb/March editon of F2, when comparing the Oly E-3 and Nkn D3, that what you would like would be a D3 sensor in a D300 body. Nkn have now delivered exactly this in the D700 (we assume), and I am very tempted to switch after 25 years of Minolta use (despite a huge investment in glass), so am really looking forward to yor insights. What are your initial thoughts on quality - image and build, and have Nkn crippled the high ISO function to protect D3 sales?

Philip

It's a nice heavy beast. They have finally given it a plain card door, not needing a second latch to be turned before opening - just like the A700 actually! Lovely viewfinder and screen. The high ISO function remains exactly as per the D3, it has 6400 then H0.3, H0.6, H1 and H2 - all the way to 25,600 despite some reports saying it only does 12,800.

I took it out today and we popped into an antique/craft fair, and Shirley was going to buy some hand made soaps. The soap maker saw the camera, asked me about it, then asked me to photograph his soap for his website instead of paying for the soap. Nothing lost! We would not normally do a shoot for the price of a few bars of soap, but it was a good subject for my test write-up and gave the camera some serious trial at ISO 400 and 1600 doing close-up still life 'in situ' without lights or a tripod. But that may give you some idea of the impact a Nikon D700 with a 24-70mm can have. Dozens of people wander round craft fairs with cameras. I'm perfectly sure he doesn't offer all comers free soap for emailing him some files of quick snaps of his display. However, a Sony A700 would probably have been as good - he uses Sony himself, but a pocket cam. When I explained that the Sony Alpha would take shots that could be enlarged to poster size, just like the Nikon, he was surprised.

David

[Carlj]

Talk of mount swapping does bring to mind the fact that within, what, 8 weeks, the A900 should be officially launched. So where will we be by the Autumn? Will Canon announce the half-shilling, sorry 6D by then? Which price bracket will the A900 be entering? UK prices are always exaggerated too.

And as for prices, with the launch price of the 1000D so ridiculously high, what hope do Canon have of "re-designing the entry-level market"?

The D700 does look good, though I wonder whether it'll hit sales of the D3?

[David Kilpatrick]

The D3 has been out of stock and over-ordered for months. The D700, if it doesn't go 'unobtainable' within days of launch, will actually fill a gap. There are not enough D3s to go round.

Just wait for the A900. It will cost as much as a D700, guaranteed - Sony is not going to be cutting prices for a sensor like that. You are looking at some amazingly good, and expensive, Sony DSLR gear to be seen at photokina. And they will not be able to meet the demand, the A900 will be back ordered for six months after it actually reaches the shops.

David

[Javelin]

Is that a miscalculation then? will people waiting for a D3 take the D700 for now then get the D3 finally when it becomes available or are they going to just stick with the D700 after they get it?

The D3 has been out of stock and over-ordered for months. The D700, if it doesn't go 'unobtainable' within days of launch, will actually fill a gap. There are not enough D3s to go round.

Just wait for the A900. It will cost as much as a D700, guaranteed - Sony is not going to be cutting prices for a sensor like that. You are looking at some amazingly good, and expensive, Sony DSLR gear to be seen at photokina. And they will not be able to meet the demand, the A900 will be back ordered for six months after it actually reaches the shops.

David