Nikon D2H - *Exclusive* sample photos - (Not!) (UPDATED)
By
Dave Etchells
(Saturday, September 13, 2003 - 16:55 EDT)
A few sample images from a prototype Nikon D2H...
I had a chance this last week to spend a little time with the new Nikon D2H. In the process, I took a few photos (well, actually more like 1200), so have posted a few here on the site.
This is Nikon's new uber-fast D-SLR, and it's a beauty. The user experience was arguably the best I've had with any camera to date, it's doggone fast at 8 frames per second, color is beautiful, and (best of all?) the battery just doesn't quit! (I shot about 1200 images over the course of two days, and the battery still had almost half its charge remaining.)
The one fly in the ointment, at least in terms of the sample photos I've posted, is that the prototype cameras I and several others were playing seemed to have very high image noise levels, particularly in shadow areas. This came as quite a surprise, since Nikon made a particular point of the low-noise characteristics of their new proprietary LBCAST sensor technology. I'm hoping that the noise levels we saw were just the result of prototype problems, but the rest of the camera's functioning was a joy to experience.
I've assembled a couple of dozen of the shots I captured, (link removed - see update below for the reason). (Apologies for the *ugly* page layout, my web-guru gal Yazmin wasn't around this weekend, but I wanted to get these up for you all, so I just pasted some comments into the HTML page output by Nikon's new Capture 4 software.)
UPDATED 2003-09-15 18:18ET: While I and the other journalists attending Nikon's "Gravity Games" event were told that the cameras we were shooting with were "very close" to final production, I have since been informed that they were in fact much earlier-stage prototypes than we were initially told. Accordingly, Nikon has asked that I remove the images previously posted here until such time as final production-level units are available to test.
Apologies for the confusion over this, it appears that Nikon US was as much surprised by this as all of us are.
- Dave Etchells
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