Nikon D80, First Thoughts
September 12th, 2006
My D80 came Monday afternoon, so here’s my first thoughts. It’s a lot like the N80 I owned a couple of years ago. The metering and the af are better. The ergonomics and the build are pretty similar. I like the reprogrammable AE/AF lock and Func buttons. I set my Func to spot metering and my AE/AF lock button to AF On; I like keeping my metering and focus seperate. It does seem kind of weird that the Func default allows you to display ISO but not set it.
Battery life is good. Thirtysix hours and a couple hundred photos later the battery meter only shows one bar down. My 7D ate batteries like a contestant just kicked off the Biggest Loser, so this is a nice change for me.
Image quality is impressive, although the default image parameters are a little agressive on the contrast and sharpening. I changed that in the image parameters pretty quick. Fine JPEGS look really good. High ISO noise doesn’t seem out of line, but I don’t plan on using anything above 800 that much. If it’s that dark the Hexar RF focusses faster than any AF I’ve ever used, and Neopan 1600 keeps the mood right for dark scenes. Auto WB seems close enough.
Picture Project is junk, so I’ll be looking for something to process raw files. Right now I’m shooting RAW + JPEG Fine, so I’m just working with the JPEGS. I’m working on a laptop, so I don’t have a lot of processing power available for decoding RAW files. Given that, I’ll probably mostly work from JPEGs unless something goes wrong.
Enough with the talk. Here’s some photos:
Battery life is good. Thirtysix hours and a couple hundred photos later the battery meter only shows one bar down. My 7D ate batteries like a contestant just kicked off the Biggest Loser, so this is a nice change for me.
Image quality is impressive, although the default image parameters are a little agressive on the contrast and sharpening. I changed that in the image parameters pretty quick. Fine JPEGS look really good. High ISO noise doesn’t seem out of line, but I don’t plan on using anything above 800 that much. If it’s that dark the Hexar RF focusses faster than any AF I’ve ever used, and Neopan 1600 keeps the mood right for dark scenes. Auto WB seems close enough.
Picture Project is junk, so I’ll be looking for something to process raw files. Right now I’m shooting RAW + JPEG Fine, so I’m just working with the JPEGS. I’m working on a laptop, so I don’t have a lot of processing power available for decoding RAW files. Given that, I’ll probably mostly work from JPEGs unless something goes wrong.
Enough with the talk. Here’s some photos:
October 17th, 2008
I absolutely loved the processing that you did on these photos. It’s tough to believe that these are from D80. Can you please tell me what settings you used on the camera or what steps you took in photoshop to achieve this look? This looks more like film than digital. Thanks!!