Rob Galbraith posts Nikon D2H samples By
Michael R. Tomkins, The Imaging Resource (Wednesday, November 19, 2003 - 14:39 EST)Our good friend Rob Galbraith, a professional photojournalist and proprietor of the Rob Galbraith Online website, has posted an interesting preview of a production-level Nikon D2H digital camera (including samples, commentary and a direct comparison with the Canon EOS-1D and Nikon D1H / D1X).
Rob cautions that he's only had three days shooting with the camera and so can't make any final judgements as yet - but he's certainly got plenty to go on (and his background as a photojournalist definitely makes him qualified to comment!)
Image noise is lower than that demonstrated in preproduction cameras, but still increases significantly at higher ISOs where Canon's EOS-1D seems to do a better job.
Color looks quite good, with saturation increased as compared to the D1H / D1X, but Rob noticed problems particularly with skin tones, and came up against a bug in Capture 4 that prevented processing photos with the "Normal" tone compensation setting.
White balance looked to be a mixed bag - at one stadium Rob found the Auto white balance triumphed where just about every other camera failed - but at two other locations the flicker-detection capability didn't seem to help auto white balance at all. The D2H apparently also didn't correct the warm cast of tungsten / incandescent lighting on Auto white balance.
Sharpening in Nikon Capture 4 seemed to be much preferable to sharpening in-camera
These are just a few small highlights of Rob's first-look - if you're even slightly considering the Nikon D2H as your next camera, definitely hop on over and read Rob's first-look for the full story. Do note that the full-resolution samples provided are not directly out of the camera, but have been post-processed in Adobe Photoshop CS, using the Save for Web function.
Rob Galbraith posts Nikon D2H samples