By WILSON ROTHMAN
Often in digital photography, what you see — color, lighting, texture — isn't
what you get. Low-light shots are plagued with orange highlights and
noise-spackled blacks; flash photography can yield bleached faces or glare from
unexpected reflectors. Expensive cameras almost always provide an opportunity for
better pictures, but Nikon's D70 is the first camera I've seen that gives total
amateurs a fighting chance to capture reality as they see it.
The D70 is a "single lens reflex" camera; when you look through the
viewfinder, you're looking through the camera's lens. The significance is that, rather
than employ a new digital means of letting light into the camera, the D70 and
other digital SLRs use the traditional yet highly evolved method involving
shutter and aperture. Until the point where light hits the 6.31-megapixel CCD,
it's doing more or less the same thing it would in a SLR film camera.
Unlike most cameras, the D70 is an instant photography class, with beginner,
intermediate and advanced ways to use it. For starters, a scene-selection knob
lets you tell the camera what to prepare for. If this sounds familiar, it
should — most digital point-n-shoot cameras have a similar selector, with
identical icons for action shot, night portrait and sweeping landscape. It's a first
for pro-level SLRs, however.
Next up are the manual settings. As you shoot using scene modes, the camera
displays on-the-fly aperture and shutter-speed settings. Once you get the
courage to go manual, it's easy to keep shooting and adjusting and shooting more,
thanks to convenient selectors at your forefinger and thumb. (Sorry southpaws,
this camera is righty friendly.) Best of all, you will instantly see the
results of upping the f-stop or dropping the shutter speed on the camera's 1.8-in.
LCD.
The third step towards photographic bliss is the custom shooting menu, which
gives you 25 freakishly specific variables to tweak — from area of auto focus
to the default intensity of the built-in flash.
Besides the obvious downsides of bulk, high price and relative complexity (an
eager student is needed, regardless of the training-wheels approach), the
biggest bummer was the D70's software, which I found confusing. Included literature hints that Nikon's PictureProject lets you edit the super high-quality raw files the camera is capable of taking, but that turned out to be true only to a limited degree. To fully manipulate the raw files, you need Nikon Capture. Strangely, only a
"trial version" of that is included. Huh? If someone spends $1,300 on the
camera, its most useful software accompaniment should be free.
Needless to say, there are thousands of D70 secrets I haven't yet unlocked. I
may yet, but even if I don't, I will relish the fact that for once I have
taken pictures that look like what I saw. I'd like to think it was my talent, but
I'm sure it was the camera's.
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