Black Friday

KEH Camera Brokers is having a site-wide 10% off sale for Black Friday, the discount code is BF21E.

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Time Capsule

Check out this Best Buy sales circular from 1996!

Remember when games for your PC came in a box and didn't require an internet connection to play? Good times.

(It was a good thing, too, because it'd take forever to download a couple CD-ROM's worth of data at 28.8 kbps...)

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Writing Time

So, if you're out shooting with an original EOS Digital Rebel, a creaky silver plastic 300D, and it has only, like one bar of battery left so you're turning it off after each shot to conserve juice...you should probably remember to wait for a solid five- or six-Mississippi to flick the switch to "OFF" because it takes that thing FOREVER to write a RAW file and if you turn it off in the middle of the save process it just corrupts the data.

Just throwing that out there. No particular reason.

Have a colorful photo shot in RAW...after I noticed that glitch.

That was shot in RAW and processed in Adobe Photoshop Bridge, just hitting "Adobe Vivid" and the "Auto" correction button.

For contrast, I switched the camera over to the Large Fine JPEG setting and shot the same scene...

It only takes about two seconds to record the highest quality JPEG, since it only takes up a little over 2MB on the card rather than the 6.6MB of a RAW file.

These days it's easy to forget that in the early days of higher-resolution digital photography, recording speed was a limiting factor; so much of one that Digital Photography Review measured how long it took to write files to the card.

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Question Answered?

So a couple posts ago we asked this question regarding the Nikon D1X:

But can a 5.3 megapixel CCD sensor take good photos still?

Personally, I think the answer is "Yes".

As you near the six megapixel mark, you're getting resolution equal to or better than all but the best 35mm films.

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Walking on its Fins

If you pick up a DSLR from, say, about 2005 or 2006, and one made this year, you'll find surprisingly few major differences in the way they operate. Sure, there are a few more buttons on the newer camera for things like Live View and other features that weren't present in the older camera, but the labeling conventions and such had been pretty well worked out by Dubya's second term.

Not so much with one made in 2001. They were still kinda winging it.

Looking at the front or top of a 2001 Nikon D1X, it would seem that the controls had already been figured out by then, but that's because those controls don't really differ from those of a Nikon film SLR. A Nikon F5 or N80 user would feel right at home. 

The little focus mode selector dial (Manual, Single-servo, Continuous-servo) is right there next to the lens mount where it can be operated by the left hand, on the opposite side of the mount is the depth-of-field preview button. The sub-command dial is on the top front of the handgrip, just below the power switch and shutter release, waiting for your index finger. The three position metering selector switch (3D Matrix metering, Center-weighted, Spot) is on the side of the pentaprism housing, with a lock button, just like on the F5.

It's when we get to the back of the camera and start running into digital-specific controls that things seem weird to our modern conventions.

The button labeled "MONITOR" at the top left is still there on newer Nikons...in the same place, and performing the same function...but it now has the more familiar "play" arrow-in-a-rectangle icon.

The monitor screen is tiny. Under that rubber DIGITAL I/O flap is an IEEE 1394 Firewire connector. Very 2001.

Buttons for white balance, and various menu controls are rubber chiclets hidden under a little magnetically-latched fold-down trap door, emulating the placement of some of the more obscure controls on the F5. In succeeding versions of Nikon's pro DSLR bodies, these would migrate out to normal buttons on the back of the camera and the trap door would go away.

The weirdest thing about the D1X is how it gets its high (for the era) resolution.

The bottleneck at the time was processing all the data from the sensor and getting it written to memory. So with the D1X, Nikon kept the number of horizontal rows the same as on the original D1's sensor (1324) but went to 4028 vertical columns*. Since the sensor data is read row-by-row, this allowed a maximum frame rate of 3fps to be maintained. 

The buffer still fills up in six shots when shooting at that speed, giving you a quick two-Mississippi of continuous shooting before you have to sit and wait for it to write everything to the card. This is not a camera for spray-and-pray action photography.

The downside to the weird sensor arrangement is that the NEF files may not be understandable to some newer 3rd party RAW converters from smaller companies. Adobe Photoshop Bridge still supports them, of course.

By comparison to some of the weirder features of the D1X, its replacement is utterly conventional.

*You can see how this works on the first page of DPReview's original D1X review.

The Deal With DX

When Nikon launched the original D1 in 1999, the big attraction was that it would seamlessly use any existing F-mount lenses a photographer already had. For a pro photographer, the biggest investment is in the glass.

During the autofocus revolution of the Eighties and Nineties, when Minolta and Canon left existing users behind by adopting entirely new mounts, Nikon stubbornly engineered an autofocus system that would allow the new cameras to retain backwards compatibility with older manual-focus lenses. With the transition to digital, they retained that same lens mount.

The thing is, CCD sensor technology was obscenely expensive. Elsewhere I looked at Canon's 1D, with an APS-H sensor, and its 1Ds, with a full frame 35mm sensor, and the price difference between these two otherwise very similar cameras:

To give an idea of how much the price of the sensor affected the price of the camera, the APS-H 4MP EOS 1D dropped in 2001 for $6500, and a year later the full frame 11MP EOS 1Ds joined it in Canon's lineup for a whopping eight grand. That's better than $200/MP or, looked at another way, seven dollars per square millimeter of additional sensor size. At seven bucks a square millimeter, the head of a pin would be $28 and a penny would be almost two grand.

Nikon went with a sensor size called "APS-C", which has 1/3rd less field of view than a standard 35mm negative, but is close enough to it in size to still be able to functionally use Nikon's existing library of F-mount lenses, although the practical result would be to give them a 1.5x focal length modifier.

For instance, I spent a day wandering around with a 35-105mm f/3.5-4.5 lens on the D1X. On a regular Nikon film SLR, this was a common enough walkabout lens in the Nineties; it covered a useful range of focal lengths from a wide-ish angle for street photography to a short telephoto for portraiture.

On the smaller sensor of the D1X, it was effectively a 53-158mm lens, however.

What does this mean in real life? Well, I saw this yellow house with an orange tree in the front yard and thought it was so colorful in the afternoon light that it warranted a picture...but there was literally no way to get it all in frame like I could have if it had been on a full frame camera, even by taking a step into the neighbor's lawn across the street.

It wouldn't be until 2003 that Nikon introduced lenses specifically designed to work with APS-C sized sensors, which Nikon called "DX". Where a typical all-in-one Nikon zoom for the film era had been a 24-120mm, the DX equivalent was a 16-80mm.

So, while a pro photog in 2001 who'd been using the F5 35mm film camera on the left could theoretically transition straight over to the D1X with all his kit*, he'd suddenly find himself short of wide angle lenses (but blessed with an abundance of super telephotos.)

*And the D1X is a camera that marked a lot of pros seriously transitioning. The original 2.7MP D1 was fine for newspaper photography, but the 5.7MP D1X could pretty much print anywhere 35mm film was used.

The current fossil...

I thought I was going to be reviewing the Sony Mavica MVC-CD300 next, but it looks like I'm spared having to drag out my cheap little USB-powered CD-ROM drive for a while longer.

I'm trying to move forward through time based on when the cameras were announced, using Digital Photography Review's camera database as the guide. According to it, the CD300 was announced near the end of February 2001, while the Nikon D1X was announced earlier that month, so the Nikon it is.

The serial number on my D1X, which I bought well-used back in 2015, marks it as one of the first 500 to leave Nikon's factory. It was already quite obsolete in 2015 and by 2021 standards, it's downright quirky.

But can a 5.3 megapixel CCD sensor take good photos still? Let's find out!

Bridge to the Future

In the year 2000 a professional photographer who needed to go digital needed to shell out ten grand for a Kodak DCS system or five grand for the Nikon D1, both of which had less than three megapixels, but were compatible with all their existing Nikon lenses. If they were a Canon shooter, they were in luck because late that year Canon launched their entirely in-house D30, which had a 3MP APS-C sized CMOS sensor and could use the existing array of EF-mount EOS system lenses. Not as ruggedly professional as the Nikon-based offerings, it was still a $3,000 purchase; a lot of dough for someone not planning on earning at least a little bit of money with it.

Hence cameras like the Coolpix 990, which not only sported a 3.34MP sensor, but also allowed an enthusiast photographer to exert almost SLR-levels of control, all for $900.

The rotating power switch surrounding the shutter release button atop the handgrip would be familiar to the user of Nikon's then-current lineup of film SLRs.

The switch can be rotated from "OFF" to one of two "REC" settings, "A" for Automatic and "M" for Manual, as well as Play, which is used to review images and videos that have been recorded on the card. The three different settings also control what comes up on the screen when the Menu button on the camera's back is pressed.

In "A" mode, the camera does most of the work for you and there's not really any way to override much of anything. Toggle over to "M" and pretty much everything's up for grabs. You can shoot in Program Exposure, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or full Manual modes just like a Nikon SLR, with the Command Dial aft of the shutter release performing the same functions. The LCD display on the top of the camera displays pertinent shooting info, again just like on an F100 or F5 film SLR.

On the rear of the camera, above the small LCD monitor, are buttons to toggle the monitor through various levels of information displayed or turn it off altogether, the Menu button, and the rocker switch for powering the zoom lens between wide angle and telephoto settings. The lens has a focal length range equivalent to 38-115mm on a full-frame camera, and is reasonably fast, with maximum aperture ranging between f/2.5 and f/4 depending on the focal length selected.

To the right of the LCD monitor is a four-way directional controller for toggling between menu settings and selecting between the five autofocus points. 

Below that is a row of three buttons that each serve two functions, depending on how they're used. The first can be used to toggle through settings for Landscape, Macro, and Self-Timer (the Macro is very useful, with a minimum close focus distance of only two centimeters.) In manual focus mode, this button is held down while rotating the Command Dial to focus. There's no focus assistance on the monitor, so the shooter needs to know the approximate distance to the subject to select the correct focusing range from fifty preset distances, 0.02M to INF.

The middle button toggles through flash modes (Auto, Off, Redeye Reduction, Fill Flash, and Slow Synch), and is used in combination with the Command Dial to adjust ISO settings. The Coolpix 990 can shoot at 100, 200, 400, or be left in Auto to select among the three for itself.

The rightmost button selects picture size and quality. Size is selected by holding the button down and rotating the Command Dial to choose between Full (2048x1536), XGA (1024x768), VGA (640x480) and a 3:2 setting to imitate the aspect ratio of a classic film negative (2048x1360). Quality is toggled by pressing the button through three different levels of JPEG compression (BASIC, NORMAL, and FINE) as well as HI quality, which saves an uncompressed TIFF. The manual is careful to point out that you'll only get one HI quality 2048x1536 TIFF on a 16MB Compact Flash card.

2048x1536 resolution, FINE compression,  ISO 400

The CF card door is on the right-hand side of the camera body and is made of thin plastic, made to feel flimsy by comparison to the general solidity of the 990's magnesium housing. Above the CF hatch is a rubberized cover over Video Out and USB/serial digital I/O ports.

On the bottom of the camera is the battery door, located close enough to the tripod socket that you aren't going to change batteries while the camera's mounted on one. The latch is a weak spot, and broke on the first Coolpix 990 I had, the one I got from Oleg. Then again, that was after a good six years of yeoman service, and Oleg reports that it's since been repaired and the camera's working fine.

The Coolpix 990 runs on four AA batteries. It's a mixed blessing, in that a set of four alkalines will be exhausted in a couple hours of shooting, especially if one is profligate with the monitor usage or leaves the camera's focus setting in Continuous mode (unlikely, as the constant whirring and chortling of the focus motor will drive the user up the wall long before the batteries fail.) But on the other hand, replacement batteries are sold...and cheaply...in every corner store; it's not like you need to remember to bring charged spares from home.

With its 3.34MP resolution and SLR-like controllability, the Coolpix 990 was a breakthrough camera. Photographer Oleg Volk used one before taking the DSLR plunge with a Canon D30. Kevin Creighton mentioned that they used 990s to supplement the hyper expensive Phase Onedigital backs they shot fashion catalogs with in the same way that Polaroids were used to supplement medium and large format studio film cameras. 2048x1536 was enough to make even diehard film shooters think that there might be something to this digital fad.

While 1999 and 2000 were the years marking the introduction of the first serious digital cameras, it's worth noting that they also marked the beginning of the end of the last generation of new film cameras. After 2000 you could count the number of film SLRs that would be released by Canon and Nikon combined without having to pull off both mittens.

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New Millennium's Resolution!

The last camera we looked at here at Digital Fossils was the 1999-vintage Sony Mavica FD-88. One of those had been my first digital camera, bought at a Knoxville, Tennessee Walmart as discounted New Old Stock in October of 2001. I used it for a couple years before getting a hand-me-down Nikon Coolpix 990 from Oleg Volk.

The Coolpix 990 was announced in January of 2000 by Nikon, heralding the new millennium with a 3.34 megapixel sensor.

Interestingly, the 3.34MP 1/1.8" CCD sensor was manufactured by Sony, who would use it in their own Cyber-shot DSC-S70, released later that same year, and sell it to other camera manufacturers as well, such as Olympus, who used it as the centerpiece of their Camedia C-3030 Zoom. Both Sony and Olympus marked their cameras with "3.3 Megapixel" badges, but Nikon wrung every kilopixel out of the 990's marketing, emblazoning the front of the Coolpix's body with a sticker reading "3.34 Megapixels".

Not only was this new 3.3MP sensor higher in resolution than the 1.2MP sensor in the '99-vintage Mavica, it was physically larger, measuring almost 9mm diagonally versus the 6mm diagonal CCD in the Sony.

While it was labeled a 1/1.8" sensor, this didn't correspond to any actual physical dimension, but was a holdover from analog video tube days. Despite having a bigger, higher resolution sensor, the Coolpix 990 boasted an MSRP a hundred dollars less than the Mavica FD-88; Moore's law was marching on.

Powered down, the Coolpix 990 was about the size and shape of a modern compact crop-sensor DSLR body.

It featured a body style that had begun with the original 1MP Coolpix 900 of 1998 and 1999's 2MP Coolpix 950. The controls and LCD monitor were all in the side of the body that had the handgrip. The lens and optical viewfinder were in the other half of the body, and it...pivoted!

The lens assembly could be rotated through more than 180 degrees. You could hold it in front of your face and use the optical viewfinder, or you could shoot using the screen for live view and hold it over your head or at waist level or wherever you needed by twisting the grip. After the demise of these two-piece Coolpix models, this feature would be missed until tilting or articulated LCD screens started becoming commonplace again a decade or more later.

The construction was rugged, with a magnesium body shell that gave a solid feeling.

Most of all, that 3.34MP sensor was about as high-res as you could get in 2000AD, equaling that of Canon's first all in-house DSLR, the 3MP D30, which cost three grand for the body alone, lens not included.

What does 3.34MP look like? About like this...

How is 640,000 like 6,600,000?

Everyone knows about the infamous Bill Gates quote:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

While there's no evidence he actually said it, and in fact he strenuously denies it, it's gone down in geek pop culture as an example of failing to anticipate future tech expansion.

While reading up for the next camera review, I ran across a similarly-flavored quote from 2000, but this one's still right there in plain text on the original website.

In his review of the slick new Nikon Coolpix 990, Phil Askey wrote

"In my personal opinion we'll reach a maximum pixel count, a level at which pro-sumers (those willing to spend upward of $1000 on a digital camera) will have enough pixels (probably around the 6.6 million pixel point - 3000 x 2200)..."

The nine hundred buck Coolpix 990, announced at the end of January '00, had 3.34 megapickles, compared to the 1.3 of the thousand-dollar Sony Mavica FD-88 that had been released just the previous August. (The actual usable MP totals were more like 1.2 for the Mavica and 3.1 for the Coolpix, but when you're in that vicious of an advertising war, you claim every fraction you can.)

"Make sure you don't leave so much as a kilopixel lying on the table!"

These days, of course, full-frame sensors of forty, fifty, or sixty megapixels are everywhere and medium format sensors have crossed the triple-digit MP threshold...with no decimal places this time.

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