DSLR Pics: Squirrels with the Nikon D2X

One of the best deals in a high-quality long telephoto zoom for DSLRs is the AF Nikkor Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED VR. You can find them used at BezosMart for under $400, which is really pretty sweet when you consider that they stickered for close to two grand when they debuted back at the turn of the Millennium.

Why are they so inexpensive? Well, they are an older style autofocus Nikon lens, utilizing a focus motor in the camera body to turn a drive screw in the lens body. This means they won't work as an autofocus lens on any of the inexpensive D3xxx or D5xxx Nikon bodies, or with an FTZ adaptor on a newer Nikon mirrorless. This reduces their demand on the used market.

Plus, it's not a very fast-focusing lens, especially on a prosumer type Nikon body. The big single-digit pro bodies, though, have torquey enough focusing motors to spin this lens reasonably quickly.

This is where the Nikon D2X comes in. The D2 series was Nikon's last pro body to use an APS-C size sensor, what Nikon calls "DX format", with the D2X having a 12MP Sony-manufactured CMOS unit, rather than the proprietary Nikon LBCAST sensor used in the D2H. 

Because they're so old, you can find good deals on them used online. I spotted mine for a couple hundred bucks in the showcase at Roberts.

Because of the 1.5X crop factor of the DX sensor, the 80-200mm lens has an effective focal length bump to the equivalent of 120-600mm, letting you get right up in the grille of Mr. Squirrel.

The effective VR system comes in handy with a lens this big and heavy, allowing you to shoot hand-held at much slower shutter speeds than you'd be able to with a non-stabilized lens. (This is one of those lenses that's big and heavy enough to rate a tripod foot.)

Here's the 80-200 mounted on my old Nikon D1X.

This is a great combo for urban wildlife, if a bit slow for birds-in-flight or sports.

Grinding Gear

So, the Shitty Camera Challenge is fixin' to start again, and I figured it would be fun to use the Nikon Coolpix 990 that was so state-of-the-art in 2000 but which definitely falls into the "shitty" category by modern standards.

Mine had been sitting on a shelf in the living room since I last played with it for this blog, back in...wow, it's been three years!

I pulled it down yesterday and the batteries were flatter than the horizon in Amarillo. "No problem," I figure, "I'll just get some fresh AA's out of the kitchen drawer." (I keep a well-stocked battery tray in there.)

I put the new batteries in the camera and turned the power on and...nothing.

Hmmm. Popped the battery compartment open and cleaned the contacts with a pencil eraser. Still nothing.

Blew air under the power switch and proceeded to pivot it back and forth vigorously. Apparently that worked, because the camera powers up now.

Fat Dan's Deli and Twenty Tap

Re-Shoots

I used the Amazon gift card Bobbi gave me for my birthday to order a used Kodak Easyshare V1073.

Now I have a copy of each digicam I used before getting my first DSLR:

• Sony Mavica FD88
• Nikon Coolpix 990
• Kodak Easyshare V1073
• Canon PowerShot SX500

Now to go back and see if I can reshoot some things I shot back in the day, using the same gear, but do it better! The arrows are the same, but the Indian's gotten a bit better over the years, or at least I'd like to think so.

Alas, I won't be able to re-do the Lucky Gunner Blogger Shoot, or Knob Creek, or classes with Louis Awerbuck and Todd Green, or...

Kodak Easyshare at Knob Creek in 2011

Digicam Pics: Terlingua, Texas with a Nikon Coolpix 990

In July of 2003 I took a roadtrip with a friend from my home in Knoxville, Tennessee to visit another friend down in Telingua, Texas on his birthday

These photos were all shot with a Nikon Coolpix 990 from the front yard of his house, halfway up a mountainside overlooking Terlingua Creek.

I don't have many digital photos I took before 2008 or so. Most of them are quietly succumbing to bitrot on the hard drive of an old Wintel box in the attic.

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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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