As you may have heard, I recently picked up a Nikon D700.
1st impression: Wow this thing is heavy.
2nd impression: holy moly this manual is huuuge (as in 444 pages)
3rd impression: It's all in English (obviously wasn't printed in Cali).
Seriously, this is one beast of a camera.
Here are my favorite features (as of yet, just got the camera late last week):
Auto ISO: You tell the camera what is the slowest shutter speed you want and the highest ISO you want and it will magically raise the ISO when the speed gets too slow. This is something I have dreamed about and saves hours of fiddling with buttons and dials and switches and menus oh my!
AutoFocus: This camera does a better job focusing on the eyes (which is where you usually want your portraits focused) in full autofocus mode (no points selected) than my Canon did with a certain point selected and aimed right on the eye.
AutoFocus 2: The Nikons have this amazing tracking mode where you tell the camera what you want to focus on and wherever that object moves, it follows, and it works! I shot my bro-in-law running around with an old 70-210 lens and it got 7 out of 10 hots in perfect focus (where my canon would get 1 out of 10, the first one).
Okay. Pause. I started this post almost two months ago. In the interim my camera died! Took my cf card out, stuck it in my reader, transferred the epics my comp, put the card back in the camera and BANG. Camera shut off and wouldn't turn on.
Shoot back in time a bit. (I'm writing this on my iPad so it's going a bit slowish). I was looking at dif places. To buy a camera online and eventually settled on ButterflyPhoto. Why? Because Bing gave me percent back and it was a good price to start (almost too good). Extremely stupid reason to choose a store. Before I bought it I called to make sure it had a USA warrantee, they said yes, but I should have asked for an email to that effect so I would have some proof if it didn't. So i get the camera, doesn't have a warrantee inside and comes with a European wire with an adapter. Warning bells go off, I call ButterflyPhoto freaking out and they tell it is a USA warrantee but since things are odd (they said it usually comes with both wires, one must have fallen out. Right.) they would send a USA wire and a 3 year warrantee from CMS (never heard of them), and they would sen me an email certifying it was a USA model (which they never did).
So a few weeks later after being in shooting heaven my camera won't turn on and I highly doubt that Nikon will take care of it.
So I timidly go to the Nikon repair center in Manhattan Beach (Cali) and lo and behold it's a USA model under warrantee and they said they will take care of it!
Turns out the card reader screwed up the CF card which screwed up the camera and pushed some pins into the AC power thingamajig (holy cow! My iPad actually recognized that as a word, but it can't get a city name straight unless I capitalize it). The Nikon rep said it was my fault and they shouldn't have covered it but they did anyway (4 points for Nikon).
Morals of the story: 1. Forget about saving a buck here and there, just buy the camera from B&H and get over it. 2. Don't spend too much time worrying if your camera has a warrantee. 3. Get a decent CF card reader. 4. Don't tell you wife that the camera you just bought instead of a dishwasher is broken and might not be under warrantee (I didn't tell her until it was at the Nikon repair center and they assured me they would fix it). She really appreciated not having to worry along with me.
Now that I got my camera back, I want to shoot instead of writing reviews, so I'll get back to that eventually.
Tracht Gut Vet Zein Gutg