So, we’re going to start addressing a few of these as a respected dealer of equipment, with all our insider knowledge and decades and decades of experience with camera equipment over the ages.

And first up is AF-S. AF-S is Nikon’s designation for lenses with an integral ultrasonic motor for focusing, introduced in 1996. Now, if you’re new to equipment, you may not know that auto-focus cameras used to use a body-based focus motor and screw drive system. Nikon’s AF-S comes under fire because starting with the D40, they started leaving a body-based motor out of their cameras, forcing users to buy AF-S lenses if they wanted autofocus. This gets decried a lot as a shameless attempt on Nikon’s part to force new lens sales and cut-off the used market. AF-S gets a lot of hate.

Of course, never mind that Canon switched entirely to in-lens focus motors when it created its EOS system and EF mount in 1987, making it’s entire FD line-up completely unusable with new cameras. Or that Olympus and Sony’s DSLR systems also use only in-lens AF systems. Or that in lens AF systems are faster, quieter, and more accurate. Obviously such technological improvements must be bad, right?

Simple answer: if you’re a new DSLR customer and can afford it, go AF-S. Even though the more expensive bodies still support the body-motor, in-lens focus motors have been the future for the past twenty years. They might cost you more than the old used ones, but they’ll continue to work going forward on all Nikon bodies. Plus, don’t forget that focus motors aren’t all that’s improved in the past twenty years: lens coatings, exotic lens elements like aspherical elements, and even basic lens formulas have all continued improving and the newer AF-S lenses will yield more than just a focus motor for your money.

And, it was a good mash-up out there. Nick and I were shooting our trademark Olympus cams, Dawn brought her Nikon D40, one gent used Panasonic’s LX3 point-and-shoot, another the original 5D, and Tony showed up with a medium-format view camera. Film, people! Film! Craziness.

It was a lot of fun. There was shooting, strobing, and later, a motorcycle. Check out the pictures in the gallery below, and make sure to find your way out to next week’s walk so that you to can start padding your portfolio with awesome shots.

We run a Flickr group dedicated to showing off pics from the various photowalks, and you can find that over at http://www.flickr.com/groups/nick-and-dereks-walkabout/. You have to join, just so we can keep it strictly to photowalks and not get a lot of the vaguely tangentially-related chaffe that you get with Flickr groups, but don’t let that turn you off. We want to see what you got out there.

It’s like fishing stories, but for photographers.

“One time, I had this awesome shot. Stellar. Change your life. There was this chick–and she was hot–and there was this explosion and a cow tap dancing.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. Can I see it?”

“Ah, no. It got away. I forgot I had my camera set to ‘FAIL’ priority…”

D300s

Up front and center is the new DX semi-pro body, the D300s, which now of course sports HD video. It is, probably unsurprisingly given its name, very similar to a D300 in most other regards. Which isn’t bad. The D300 at introduction was an astounding, revolutionary camera and I don’t imagine adding 720p @ 24 fps is going to be detrimental to that legacy.

D3000

The D3000 is a bit of a curveball, apparently forgoing the movie mode of its other recent Nikon kin (although the specs table still lists AVI as a format, mind fixing that, Nikon?). It is fairly typical specs-wise, sporting just over 10 megapixels and 11 autofocus points. Lacking the swiveling screen of its big brother, the D5000, and movie mode, I feel pretty confident saying this slots into their entry level division, and is priced accordingly, coming out around $600 with the 18-55 VR lens.

AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II

In a move many have been waiting for ever since the release of the D3 almost 2 years ago, Nikon has finally announced a revision to it’s 70-200mm 2.8 VR. Part of the holy trinity of pro zooms, the AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II slots in with the other newer pro lenses to (we expect) create a line-up from 14 to 200mm with enhanced performance for the increasingly more-demanding sensors Nikon has been churning out (D3x, anybody?)

AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR II

And, lastly, the ever-popular consumer super-zoom, the 18-200mm VR, has been revised, and we’re expecting increased sharpness and overall optical performance out of this lens too. If its predecessor was any benchmark, this stands to be one of the hottest lenses Nikon currently offers.

As is the norm around here, these will all have wait-lists for them so we can handle requests in a rational manner. Call us up at 1-800-726-5544, ask for Mail-Order, and let us know which product you’d like. We’ll add you to our list, and once we start getting these in we’ll go through those lists in order, call you up, and if you still want/need it, we’ll do the sale then.

It’s the whole “You got peanut butter in my chocolate! No you got chocolate in my peanut butter! But what’s the answer? Will it work!
Luckily our Nikon representative was on site and we were able to persuade him to find out, because inquiring minds want to know. A call was made, a tech guru’s ego pampered and in a few minutes the definitive answer delivered.  Either battery will work in any of the cameras mentioned in this expose. The EN-EL9a is a higher storage capacity brother to the original EN-EL9 Nikon Digital Batteries. Whew! That’s a load off.

Next week we are going to call him about global warming, or the ever present  Coke vs. Pepsi debate.

D6000 (Body Only)

Well, because Jody in his infinite brilliance managed to accidentally delete the first version of this post, here we go again:

There it is kiddies! The D5000! I’ve seen this bouncing around rumor town a bit, and it’s nice to see it’s true. For those not up with the jazz, it’s a slightly stripped down D90 with a smaller bod and a new and happening tilt/swivel LCD (which I love, and which brings the DSLR market up to 4 current models with it, 6 if you count the Sonys with tilting screens, 7 if you add the lonely E-330 down on our shelf that someone needs to take home.)

So, in the interest of public service, here’s a breakdown of the pertinent differences (also known as “why this isn’t going to kill the D90″), comparing the new and shiny D5000 to the D90:

Pros:

• Tilt/swivel LCD
• Smaller body (though not by much, apparently)
• Lighter body (fairly notable, actually, 100g or so)

Cons:

• Smaller LCD (2.7″ @ 230,00 vs the D90′s 3″ with 920,000 dots. BIG difference.)
• No built-in AF motor. That’s right, the D5000 has the same lens compatibility issues as the D40-D60 bodies.
• Smaller viewfinder (approx. 95% coverage at .78x magnification vs 96% coverage at .94x magnification.

Both bodies have 720 video at 24 FPS, 11 point auto-focus systems, 12.3 megapixel imagers, and play nicey-nice with the GP-1 GPS dongle. I’m taking it on faith they also have varied delete functions, which unfortunately my editor also does.

Click the picture above for more info. To get your hot little name on our waitlist email info@robertsimaging.com.

So, to help put things in perspective, I stumbled across this video which I’ve encountered a couple times in my stint here, and thought I’d share it with everyone. It’s a short segment on how lenses are made (in the general, so it applies no matter if we’re talking Canon lenses, Nikon lenses, Sony lenses, Oly lenses, Sigma lenses, Tamron, Tokina, blah-de-blah-de-blah). Seriously, basically any camera lens going these days is a flat-out marvel of engineering. Just check this cut-out version of Olympus’ revised “standard” zoom, the 14-54:

Impressed? I sure am. I certainly couldn’t have engineered something like that, and yet hundreds of people take that lens for granted every day. And it doesn’t even have any fancy tricks like ED glass.

And, if that’s not enough, here’s that video to show us just what it takes to make each of those actual glass lenses inside that sucker:

And if Fuji can follow through on its promises, we might soon have a new breed of camera starting to arise that has to make no compromises and specialize in one of those fields while sacrificing a little of the others.

Announced recently for a compact camera, but with potential application in larger sensors that has a lot of advanced amateurs watching with interest, is the new EXR technology. At the foundation of this technology is a restructuring of the traditional Bayer filter. The Bayer filter is a filter over the sensor on basically every digital camera going and tells the camera how to see the world in color, and not just values of light.

On the left is a traditional Bayer filter. A row of alternating Red and Blue and then a row of Green (turns out our eyes favor green pretty heavily). On the right is the pattern reworked for their EXR technology. You can see there’s still twice as much green as red or blue, but the new trick is that there are two pixels of each color next to each other at all times.

Further beyond that is that one pixel is high gain, it absorbs light very quickly. The other of the two is low gain, absorbing light slowly.

What’s all this mean, especially in relation to low-light, resolution, and dynamic range? What Fuji is saying is that the sensor can be switched between three different “modes.”

On is resolution. You can tell the sensor to use every pixel traditionally, which gives you high resolution.

The next is dynamic range. Those two pixels, the high and the low gain? The high gain lets shadows expose quicker, the low gain protects highlights. It halves the resolution, but should give a fairly notable increase in dynamic range by treating each type (high/low) as a different image and then combining the data, sort of like in-camera HDR.

The third is low light. Since the two pixels side-by-side see the same color, the camera can “bin” them together. This halves resolution, but creates a pixel twice the normal size, which means the picture will have less noise by nature. It sounds like it can do further binning, effectively letting you get unbelievable ISOs at the cost of resolution, not noise.

Time will tell what impact this has on the market, but as far as photo tech goes I think this is one of the neater announcements I’ve seen in some time.

And so we waited.

And, first out of the gate was a Panasonic digital camera calling itself the “DMC-G1,” or jst the “G1.” The G1 was (and, as of now, still is) the first of its breed: no mirror, interchangeable lenses, EVF, contrast auto-focus, SLR-sized sensor (the same size sensor used in my beloved Olympus digital cameras, and which I think gets entirely more criticism than real-life performance merits). And all of that is a very technical way of saying the following:

If you’re wanting better quality than a point-and-shoot can offer, but don’t want to have to deal with the hassle a traditional DSLR brings with it (I know my friends give me odd looks when it takes me three minutes and some off camera-flash to nab a shot), this is your camera. Intherchangeable lenses mean you’re no longer stuck with the limited 3x, 4x, or maybe 5x zoom your camera came with. You can go wider, you can go longer. It focuses just like your point-and-shoot, but faster. It’ll simulate shutter blur for you, it has focus zoom.

The reviews are starting to come in. Popular Photography named it the 2008 camera of the year, stating “The reason? In a contest where the criterion is “the camera that best refined or redefined photography,” the debut of the G1 represents a re-defining moment.” DPReview just today finished its exhaustive (and exhausting to read) review, finally concluding that this camera is “Highly Recommended” and stating that “In use the G1 does indeed offer the ease of use of a compact camera – especially if you stick it on fully automatic and ignore the wealth of options and pages of menus. If you’ve been using a Panasonic FZ series – or any advanced compact camera – you’ll feel right at home with the G1. There’s a good selection of external controls as well as Panasonic’s useful on-screen quick menu, giving the best of two worlds combined.”

It’s an innovative and, so far, unique product, and it’s worth considering if you’re looking to make the upgrade. Actually, I’d go so far as to say it is the ideal upgrade. (Please note, I’m not calling it the best camera ever ever, but it certainly bridges the point-and-shoot/DSLR gap better than anything else going.)

The other day we had a call asking about trading a Pentax K1000, and it took me a minute to remember that was a film body, I was mentally confusing it with the K1000D, a somewhat dated but still nice consumer DSLR. 1 letter in this case is a big difference.

And, just now, we had a call about a Rebel X. Yup, just “X”, which was of course before the age of digital also, going back to a time when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular the first time around. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d get to use seriously.

Looking up the exact specs of the Rebel X I found out it was a variant of another model, the Rebel XS. Not to be confused with the Rebel Xs, which is a new Canon digital SLR camera. Note the tricky capitalization difference. OK, sure, technical digital Rebels are called, well, Digital Rebels actually, but who calls them that in everyday conversation? EOS Rebel maybe, but Digital Rebel?

Other confusions include the D40 (a consumer Nikon digital SLR camera) and the 40D (a prosumer Canon digital SLR camera), a mess made further obnoxious by the D60 (current Nikon) and the D60 (dated Canon).

More? How about the P80 and D80 (more of a problem in phone conversations, but has lead to some misunderstandings).

The E-1 was the first professional caliber DSLR in the Olympus digital camera world. The E1 is one of the Canon PowerShot digital cameras aimed at theyounger demographics.

I give up. We need better names.