First, I like the camera, but it has its foibles. Namely:
1) Focus! It's painful. If I'm in M mode, I want manual focus to be up all the damn time, not when I occasionally hit the focus button. I'm willing to live with the constraint that focus isn't that rapid (it's actually pretty comparable to a non-AF-S nikon, at least on the subjects I try to focus on, because I always focus on edges). I'm irked by a manual mode that isn't manual.
2) Going around the horn on ISO. I want to be able to select ISO, and then go left or right. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but constantly going to 1600 to go back to 100 is irritating. If there were a way to limit the qs menu from 100, 200, and 400 (for instance), I'd be fine, and a way to set that range for night shooting/day shooting.
3) The shutter seems to have just a touch of lag. I'd see something on the screen, hit the capture button, and then it would capture the moment just a bit later. Not a deal killer, but irking when trying to shoot a kid.
4) I assume that there's some focus lock thing (again with the focus!). I get the focus set how I like, and then I shoot, and the camera readjusts focus (incorrectly, most of the time). This behavior seemed a bit intermittent, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because I took the shot quickly within getting focus?
Now the goodness!1) I was pleasantly surprised at how closely the lens focused. The range is pretty excellent, for instance getting this shot here:
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That flower was pretty close to the lens, definitely within two feet, probably within one foot. That surprised me.
2) This thing is sharp like a razor, when you get the focus right. Compare:
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with
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3) It's possible to get shots of kids:
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That become very nice black and whites:
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4) Black and white conversion has a very interesting graininess to it when converted using SPP:
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Compare that to other Nikon converted b&w's from lightroom at similar iso:
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Personally, I prefer the SPP image, and the actual ratio to keepers to throwaways because of movement is comparable.
BUT! The extremely ugly:SPP is, bar none, the worst image processing software I have ever used. The results are great, but take way way way too long. I have a dual core X2 2 ghz machine with 3 gb of RAM running Windows 7. By no means a screaming machine, but it's absolutely ridiculous that I should wait about a minute just to open an image.
Continuing with enumerations, this software needs:1) Someone to sit down the an optimizer and Scott Meyer's book on Effective C++. If they're not writing in C++, then they're doing it wrong, period. I'm willing to bet that if I took a look at that code, I would find a whole bunch of nested for loops with the stopping criteria evaluated in the loop rather than assigned to a const-- there's no way this code is this slow without some bad looping.
2) Here's another image processing optimization tip: if you iterate through the image more than once, you're doing it wrong.
3) If you iterate without an iterator or a pointer, you're doing it wrong.4) Cancel button. That the cancel button appears to be to kill the processing app is just wrong, because it could introduce data corruption issues.
5) Where's crop? I think that there are some basic functions that could be provided here pretty simply, like cropping to particular ratios (either predefined or user entered), or ... Well, really, I just want to crop.
6) It's ok to have a background thread that processes all the images in the specified folder in the background, so that when I open an image, I don't wait a minute for the image to open.
7) What about presets that are available on the camera, like Sepia?Final verdict: I really, really like this camera. It didn't take me that long to figure out the controls, and I figure that people will immediately correct my focus issues, which is fine. It will definitely replace my d300 as a walkaround camera, but I need more experience with it before I'll feel confident to take it to an event I'm paid to capture.
I will replace SPP as soon as I can. I fantasize that there will be a reasonable Lightroom plugin to process these images, because SPP really is just horrible. The images it makes are beautiful, but I don't buy the argument that good things come to those who wait; when I take 200 images, I don't want to take four days to process them.
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