Last Shots: Final images from my Nikon D1X

Here are the keepers from my last stroll with the Nikon D1X, wearing the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8G ED AF-S zoom lens...

Goodbye, D1X...

I had my Nikon D1X out to get some exercise a couple days ago, and when I went to take a shot, the shutter made a weird noise and it looked like the mirror didn't cycle properly. I powered it off for a quick count of ten Mississippi and turned it back on again and everything seemed to return to normal.

Then yesterday afternoon I was out with it again and when I went to take a shot the mirror stuck in the up position. I was able to manually lower it with the camera off and the battery removed. Even with a fresh fully-charged battery, the camera just makes a muted whirring noise when the shutter button is pressed and the mirror doesn't budge.

I think this is the end for my D1X. Time to put a body cap on it and shelve it alongside my Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, which had taken to spending more time throwing error codes than functioning properly.

Considering that Nikon launched the D1X in early February of 2001 with serial number 5100000 and mine is serial number 5100496, it's an old one. I was down to one really good NiMH battery pack and one that was on its last legs. It was too old to even work with my favorite Nikon DX lens, because it couldn't control the electronic diaphragm on the 16-80mm f/2.8-4E.

At this point it's a 20+ year-old DSLR that, to judge by the body, saw years of hard pro service before I bought it back in 2015; the equivalent of a workhorse getting a job giving kiddie rides at a petting zoo as a retirement gig. It's not economically repairable, but I've had some good times with it. Took it to Blogorado back in '15, shot some roller derby with the Atomic Nerds in Albuquerque, and it accompanied me on plenty of neighborhood walks.

I knew this day was coming, but I'm still a little sad.

Good job, Nikon.

Disc Pics: The Sony Mavica MVC-CD300

At the dawn of the digital era there was still uncertainty as to which storage media would dominate. Compact Flash took an early head start, but the storage wars raged for a few years there.

Sony actually had a successful line of early digital cameras that recorded photos and video on 1.44MB 3.5" floppy discs. Thing is, those floppy discs that could hold a reasonable number of 640x480 shots started looking pretty insufficient as sensor resolutions raced past the megapixel mark around the turn of the millennium.

Sony briefly experimented with cameras that used 8cm CD-R discs, beginning with the Mavica MVC-CD1000 which they announced in the summer of 2000. The CD1000 sported a two megapixel sensor which meant you could get better than seventy JPEG images on a 156MB CD-R, as opposed to the three 1.3MP images my Mavica FD88 can squeeze onto a floppy.

At the time, the big advantage that Sony's floppy disc and CD-R Mavicas offered was the ability to transfer photos to nearly any computer via sneakernet. With other digital cameras of the era, you either had to have a card reader, which were far from ubiquitous, or you had to laboriously cable the camera to the computer via USB. On the other hand, almost every desktop and laptop of the time had a floppy drive, a CD-ROM, or both.

Above is the Mavica CD300, a 3MP camera from early 2001, representing the second generation of Sony's CD-R cameras. As you can see, within a single year, the resolution of cameras had jumped by 50%, from the 2MP CD1000 to the 3MP CD300.

The handwriting was on the wall for disc cams almost from their launch. The last generation of CD-R Mavicas came out in February of 2003, by which time the 5MP CD500 was down to fifty JPEGs per disc and, unlike the constantly growing capacities of Compact Flash and SD cards, CD-R capacity was fixed. The disc era only lasted six years, from 1997 to 2003.

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Old Enough to Vote

Had the Nikon D1X out to keep the shutter exercised yesterday. With a 21-y.o. camera, you don't take that for granted. Sooner or later it will snap its last photo...but that day wasn't yesterday!

The staff at Fat Dan's is friendly!

The problem with the D1X for indoor work by available light is my paucity of Nikon DX lenses. The best DX lens I have for the purpose is the 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR, but the D1X is too old to control the electronic diaphragm on that lens. There's the 17-55mm f/2.8G, but it's not stabilized and it's a bazooka of a lens; very unsubtle.

I went with the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G, which is also not stabilized, but at least is compact and light. The 18-70 was originally a kit lens for the then-new D70 in 2004. The lens was discontinued in the early 'teens, but is a hidden gem in the Nikon DX lineup. Inexpensive and tack sharp, even dudes like Thom Hogan speak well of it.

With an old camera like the D1X, your maximum realistically usable ISO is 800, and even that's pushing it, as you can see by the noise in the portrait I shot.

It's hand-held, 1/125th of a second at f/4 at a focal length of 34mm in aperture priority mode with the lens cranked as wide open as it would get.

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Project Evolution...

Sometimes I get a little carried away with a project idea...

Nikon F5 > D1X > D2X > D3

The need for speed...

One thing I noticed when I was shooting the D1X last month was how quickly the buffer filled up. I popped off several shots at that Caddy as it rolled by and the camera made me stop and let it catch up at something like seven or eight.

This confused me as all the media about the camera, even when it was new, claimed the D1X could shoot three frames per second for 21 consecutive shots before the buffer filled. 

The sports-oriented D1H had less resolution but could blaze away at 5 FPS for forty shots before it bogged down. That's a full eight seconds with the shutter button mashed; enough time to cover an NFL play from the snap.

The disconnect, as I soon figured out, was that I was shooting in RAW, which was not as often done in the earliest days of digital. That buffer that held twenty-some JPEGs only holds six or seven .NEF files (Nikon's proprietary RAW format.) You can count "two Mississippi" and then you're done until the buffer's flushed out, or has room for another image.

From a retrospective on the D1X's predecessor, the original D1:

The super fast speed was partially hindered by the settings. While JPEG processing was really fast and almost instantenious, switching to RAW cause the camera to crawl. Storage time went sky high, 45 secs per photo not uncommon. People complaining today about slow CF/SD cards shoud respect that a microdrive could only deliver 0.5 MB/sec and the D1 electronics limited the fastest CF Cards (12x Lexar) to data rates well below 1 MB/sec.

I was using a 133x Transcend 2GB card, probably capable of receiving data a lot faster than the old D1X could send it, so at least the buffer probably cleared faster.

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Built like a tank...

I had my Nikon D1X out yesterday. I'm not sure of the shutter count on my example, but it's an old one. D1X serial numbers started out in 2001 at 5100001, and mine's number 5100496. The 17-55mm f/2.8 DX glass on the camera wasn't much newer. The serial number would indicate it was an early one, too, probably made in 2003.

Still takes a decent photo...

This would have been top flight pro kit in 2003. Six grand worth of body and next thing to two more of lens. 

I got the lens, cosmetically well-worn but functionally fine, for a bit less than five bills at Roberts. For use on crop-sensor Nikon DSLRs, the 17-55/2.8 has largely been supplanted by the excellent 16-80mm f/2.8-4E. The latter has a greater focal length range, spiffy new nano crystal coating, and vibration reduction to more than make up for the stop of aperture it gives up at longer focal lengths. Thing is, it uses an electronically-controlled diaphragm that the D1X is too old to communicate with.

I don't know if a camera store or pawn shop would even give you any money at all for a D1X these days. Used ones are bringing about a hundred bucks or thereabouts.

Still takes an okay photo. Nikon builds their pro bodies like tanks; you could bludgeon a dude to death with one of these and then take pictures of the crime scene with it.

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!