My Nikon D80, one year on

A year ago today, I went digital, buying a Nikon D80 (above). Here are my thoughts on the camera after 12 months with it.

My first proper camera was a Leica M2 rangefinder (which I still have). Bought in 1981, this was later joined by an M3 and an M6, also still in my possession. I used a Canon F1 SLR kit at work, but this was replaced by Nikon equipment which offered sharper lenses. Since the late 1990s I’d been thinking about Going Digital. Indeed recently, I dug out a digital photography supplement to Amateur Photographer that I'd bought in 1997, singing the praises of the New Medium. The best camera of the time, offering 660,000 pixels (yes, 0.6 megapixels), was from Sony and cost well over £800.

For ten years I kept my eye on developments in digital photography. I took my first tentative steps with a Nokia 6300 mobile phone with a 1.3 MP camera built in. Double what the tip-top Sony from only eight years earlier could offer, but still nowhere near 35mm film quality. After a while, the gadgety nature of this phonecam ceased to be of interest. I needed something much, much better. But I could finally see the benefits of digital.

After ploughing through innumerable websites and photo magazines, I made an informed decision. Although a lifelong rangefinder fan (compact, discreet), I decided on a single lens reflex (SLR) camera (bulky, ostentatious); I already had several Nikon manual focus lenses (which still fit the latest digital autofocus Nikon bodies) and so I went for Nikon. The D80 SLR was the one for me. Better featured than its smaller brother the D40X, much cheaper than its semi-professional bigger brother, the D200. All have the same 10.2 MP chip. I did some price comparison – best deal in either Poland or the UK was to buy it at Dixons Duty Free at the airport, as a kit, complete with 18-135mm Nikkor zoom lens. Pricewise, this was around 1,000 zlotys cheaper than the best online deal in Poland! I paid £647 for the kit, passed on Dixon’s grotequely over-priced memory card, buying one in Poland the next day for less than half the price.

After a few weeks I bought a better lens, Nikon’s 18-200mm zoom, which as well as having the extra focal length range, also has vibration reduction, meaning you can hand-hold at longer exposures. The 18-135mm lens I sold at Warsaw’s Sunday camera fair at Stodola (now a shadow of its former glory). Two filters – an ultraviolet one that’s basically a transparent lens cap, and a circular polarising filter to accentuate blue skies – and that’s it. Here's an entire camera bag's worth of kit in one body and one lens. My old habit of staring into camera shop windows looking for what to buy next is over. (Incidentally, I do know what to buy next – an 80-400mm zoom for even longer telephoto reach, useful for aviation photos, and a Nikon D300 body, the 12.3 MP successor to the D200.)

Digital photography beats film photography on two counts: Time and Money.

Money first. Since buying the camera, I’ve taken 12,000 photos. That’s an average of 1,000 a month. That equates to 28 rolls of 36 exposure film. Buying Fuji or Kodak films, developing the negatives and having them scanned to CD (as I used to do), costs 43 zlotys or nearly 9 quid a roll. Monthly, that’s 250 quid, annually, 3,000 quid or over 14,000 zlotys! That’s how much I would have spent had I rattled off 12,000 exposures on a film camera. In other words, for a serious film photographer, going digital with a high-end camera will pay for itself in months rather than years.

Time. I go out with the camera, take 40-50 photos per shoot maybe more. I return to the house, connect camera to PC, within minutes I can have photos up on my blog. With film, I’d have to wait to Monday until the photolab was open, drive there (Plac Lubelski), park, wait in queue to drop off, wait a day or two for the job to be done, return to the photolab, wait in queue, pay, go home, slip CD into PC, then finally get to work.

Digital’s other main time-related benefit is to see what you’ve just photographed. Tricky stuff like multiple exposures, long exposures (lightning flashes, fireworks) would be purest guesswork. But with digital, you can see what you’re doing and take immediate steps to correct – too short, too long, increase or decrease ISO (sensitivity). Being able to alter sensitivity with every shot rather than altering by changing rolls of film is also incredibly useful.

So – onto the Nikon D80 review. I’d kick off by saying this is the perfect camera, with a few drawbacks. The positives are all so strong I won’t bother enumerating them, but will just list the things I don’t like.

I’ll start with the lens. I’m asking a lot of a lens to replace the entire battery of prime lenses I used to drag about with me. The 18-200mm covers the equivalent of 28mm-300mm on 35mm film cameras. That’s a huge range. Something wider – like my 21mm Super Angulon I have for my Leicas – would be nice; I’ve needed this a few times, mainly for skyscapes with rainbows and tight interiors. And longer – like the 80-400mm Nikkor zoom I mentioned above. My criticisms of Nikkor 18-200mm lens boil down to abberations – barrel and pincushion distortions and vignetting, especially at the long end. Nikon has proprietary software (Capture NX it’s called), which digitally corrects the abberations of each Nikkor lens. A partial solution, but a good one. The other criticism is that when you’re walking around with the camera over your neck or shoulder, the lens slips from ‘wide’ to ‘tele’ due to the weight of the front elements. Annoying when you lift the camera to your eye for a grab shot to discover the lens has zoomed itself out to 200mm. And after a year, the rubber grip around the zoom barrel has slackened. Otherwise, I’ll back the online reviewers who call this lens ‘a miracle’, ‘life-changing’, ‘a breakthrough’, etc.

This is the perfect all-round, general purpose lens. OK, it’s not particularly fast (f3.5 to f5.6), but the VR (vibration reduction) allows you to hand-hold down to ¼ sec at the wide end and 1/50th sec at the long end without visible motion blur.

The body. This is everything I ever dreamed of in a camera. I’d like a more solid body (the D300 has a magnesium chassis rather than the D80’s polycarbonate build), a larger screen would be nice (D300 has three inches compared to two and half on the D80). I’d like to edit my own menus (the two things I’m constantly checking/changing are battey life and ISO), and I’d like not to have to scroll far between sub-menus to find frequently-used menu items.

And a propos the battery, it’s excellent. It usually lasts a week, interspersed with three or four shoots, between charges. And after one year/12,000 exposures, the battery meter rates the battery ‘0’ on a scale of 0 to 4 where 0=new battery and 4=replace instantly.

For the first two months after buying the camera, I spent all my spare reading time poring over the manual. There’s much to learn if you want to use the camera to its full potential, especially if hitherto you’ve been using manual, mechanical film cameras with manual focus lenses.

So – summing up – this camera has brought me a vast increase in my pleasure from photography. I love it to bits. I thoroughly recommend the Nikon D80 with 18-200mm lens. Though if you have the extra cash, the Nikon D300 with 18-200mm lens would be even nicer.

My film cameras – Leica M2, M3 and M6 – have acquired thick layers of dust. Expensive classics though they may be, fine male jewelry, I no longer have any inclination to waste time and money shooting film. (One day some enterprising engineer may wish to create a digital back/base for the Leica M-series. Then they come out of mothballs.) I also have a vast library of b&w negatives, colour slides and colour negs, which one day, in my retirement, I shall scan, edit and upload the best ones.

Camera phones - the 1.3 MP Nokia 6300 has been replace by a 5 MP Nokia N95 (used to take the photo at the top of this post). Now this does the job for a pocketable, with-me-at-all-times camera for use when I'm not lugging the Nikon.

For me at least, film is dead. (Although Moni has opined that ‘film is the new vinyl’)

See also:
My Nikon D80, two years on