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Re: Thursday, April 13, 2006
I have both a Canon S40 and a Nikon D70S. (BTW, I assume that you mean the D70S since that's the current production.) The D70S takes much better pictures, but it is a lot more fuss and bother to travel with. A real SLR is much more of a theft target. A real SLR with lenses is also much bulkier. Since I view checked luggage as unthinkable, this makes the D70S a problem when traveling by air. Bringing it means more headaches packing. I usually travel without it. I bring it when I have reason to expect good photo's. As you move up in quality you also move into the territory where the reality of photography intrudes. What matters most is the lens. Consider what pictures you usually take and decide whether you want other lenses. Megapixels mean much less. The Nikon CCD is a 10-bit CCD, rather than the 8-bit found in less expensive cameras. This makes much more difference to picture quality than you expect at first. Another factor that will be a bother at first. The Nikon UI is totally oriented around through the viewfinder operation. You need to read the manual, learn the button positions, and practice a bit. This investment is not too high and the reward is real camera control while looking at the photo scene. One result of this decision is that the menu-oriented UI on the back LCD is unsuitable for taking pictures. They expect you to use the viewfinder for that. The back LCD is for non-picture operations like setting defaults. If you don't make the investment in reading and a few hours practice, you will be unhappy and miss the really good UI for the camera. Finally, be prepared to operate in RAW mode. It makes a big difference once you get the software to take advantage of it. The default Nikon RAW mode gobbles RAM (about 6MB per picture) but captures both a RAW and a surprisingly good JPEG preview. RAW captures the full 10-bit CCD values, which permits re-adjustment of lighting color temperature and exposure corrections. JPEG compressed away the information needed to do this right. I dealt with this by getting a 1GB CF card for the camera. That holds about 150 shots.
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