Let's Go Digital's preview was terrific. The reviews are also streaming in. The Nikon D70s is another winner for Nikon.
As a Nikon shooter [with a limited budget] this is the digital SLR I want now. I was interested in the Fuji S3 Pro, but the mixed reviews and Fuji's dubious claims that it is a 12-megapixel camera have swayed me back to the company I have stuck with all this time. Is this brand loyalty? Partly.
Several of my friends have switched sides and have bought Canon cameras and lenses. No doubt Canon has stepped all over Nikon in this very competitive field and Nikon response has been slow and rather glib.
The recent controversy that Adobe stirred up over Nikon's encryption of white balance metadata in RAW image files [in essence disabling a photographer's rights to her/his own digital negative] certainly motivated many a serious photographer to move to the Canon camp. I am not sure if this affects Nikon D70 or D70s users as much as it does Nikon D2H users. Regardless, with so much invested in Nikon glass, I just can't justify the jump at this time to Canon or any other camera company.
Ideally, and I do mean that literally, I want the next generation of the Nikon D100 camera line, with better bit depth and among many other things, a vertical grip so that I can comfortably shoot portraits. The D70 and the D70s both don't have a built in vertical grip, though one is available through Harbortronics [currently backordered]. There are some unsubstantiated rumblings that a Nikon D200 is under production. We are talking about Nikon here and their production schedule is historically slow. So, don't hold your breath. The Nikon D70s it is for now until something better comes along in the future.
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