Hands-On With Nikon's D2x Digital SLR

The camera body is comfortable and easy to shoot with, despite being loaded down with every option known to man. It's big and heavy, but still easy to handle with one hand. Nikon put a second shutter release and control dial on the bottom-right corner to make shooting verticals a breeze. However, I had to remember to lock that second release when I wasn't using it--I kept brushing against it and inadvertently taking pictures of my shoes. The LCD is big and bright, and the shooting and playback menus are expertly designed and very intuitive. Switching among playback modes--so you can see just the image, the image with histogram, or the image with shooting info--is simple. I also liked that you can customize what displays in the menus, and that you can save up to four different "banks" of custom shooting settings.

An interesting feature is the high-speed crop mode, which trades resolution for shooting speed. When engaged, the camera takes pictures of only the center portion of the frame; the live area shows in the viewfinder. The camera records about half the megapixels, but the maximum frame rate jumps from about 5 frames per second to 8 fps. You can also record more images before the camera's frame buffer fills up. Being able to see what's just outside the recorded image area is an advantage when you're shooting sports events--you can better predict just when the receiver is going to catch the football, for example. Old press cameras used to have "sports finders" that fulfilled this function.

For professionals, one of the more debatable aspects of the D2x is the physical size of its CMOS chip. It's 75 percent of the size of a 35mm frame, as opposed to the chip in Canon's top-of-the-line EOS 1Ds Mark II, which is 100 percent of a 35mm frame, and 16.7 megapixels. That means that your Nikon film lenses, though they will still work, effectively will have longer focal lengths; you may need to go buy a new wide-angle lens. The upside to the Nikon is its $5000 price, as the Canon costs $8000 for the body only.

I should note that, in judging picture quality, I work with a 22-megapixel Imacon camera back, so I'm used to looking at higher-resolution files. But the pictures the Nikon produced were clean and relatively sharp, with good color right out of the box. The level of noise was acceptable, even when I shot with a long shutter speed in low light. I won't be throwing my Imacon away, though. Some photographers' opinions to the contrary, I think medium-format digital backs provide a better combination of large file size, sharpness, and minimal noise than do digital SLRs.

I used the Nikon Capture trial-version software to process the files, which I had shot in the raw format. Processing and saving out to TIFF files with the software seemed adequately quick, and the program provided far more fine-tuning tools than I'm used to with my Imacon image-processing software. But Nikon Capture's editing functions felt a bit sluggish, even on a dual-processor, 2.5-GHz Power Mac G5 with 4GB of RAM.

Lastly, I came across a lot of debate in several imaging discussion groups about Nikon's NEF raw file format and its encrypted white-balance data. Most of the debate seemed more philosophical than practical: Is it better to process NEF files in Nikon's Capture software, or should you have access to all of your image data using Photoshop? Though I cannot say which is better, using Capture along with Photoshop does seem to add an unnecessary extra step, especially given Photoshop CS2's new raw-file handling and batch-processing features.

Marc Simon has been a professional photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than twenty years, using both traditional and digital technologies.