James Lim Photography

Lately, I haven’t been happy with my cameras.  The Canon 5Ds are great, but their autofocus leaves me desiring for something more reliable.

So, I asked Carolynn if I could borrow her Nikon D700. Well, now that I had the opportunity to try the D700, here are my impressions.

Positives
- The body feels and handles like a pro camera. It has a very rugged, heavy and solid rock feel to it
- ISO performance is simply amazing
- AWB, while not perfect, is better than the 5D
- Autofocus is very fast and very very very accurate. 51 autofocus points are awesome.
- The huge screen is beautiful. Almost too good. It makes everything look perfect on the LCD.
- There’s so much custom functions. While this can be a negative to some, I find it beneficial that I can change these settings.

Neutrals
- There’s buttons for everything on the camera. It was confusing at first, but I can see why Nikon fans will say ergonomics on Nikon bodies are better. After about 3 days of use, I’m pretty comfortable with many of the functions. I put this as a neutral because I can accidentally change a setting when there are too many buttons. I’ve done that with the 5D before and I’m sure this can be a common problem on the D700.
- Everything is opposite. (I won’t say backwards, because backwards would imply that one is correct and other is wrong). The zoom, lens mount, the rear cap, the exposure compensation and many things are opposite from Canon. This was frustrating at first, but I got used to it quickly.

Negatives
- Images are not as sharp as 5D. From what I read, 5D has weak AA filter. I have no idea what that means, but I do know that my pics from 5D is sharper than the D700. This can also be a characteristics of different lenses, but it’s my conclusion that D700 files are generally softer than 5D.
- No joystick.  Canon’s joystick is something I took for granted. Changing from multipoint autofocus area to single point in Canon is so easy.  On the D700, it takes a few steps.  First turn the knob down to select points, and the use the dial/control to move thru 51 points to select the focus point. This in my opinion one of the most annoying things in Nikon.
- while AWB is very good, when it’s off, it’s so off. it was only on few of them, but they were so bad that i just threw the file away. This is probably a user error.

Other thoughts.
- RAW converter makes such a big difference. I was using ACR 4.5 and the colors and sharpness were disgusting.  Yes, disgusting.  But when I got the newest ACR, the colors and sharpness was much better. Much like DPP, people are saying Nikon’s NX2 is even better.  I will have to give that software a try later.
- For web, I usually resize the image to 900×600, but Nikon resizes to a 902×600. It’s not a big deal, but I wonder why Nikon did that.  I don’t know if I should crop that 2px out.

I’m too heavily invested in Canon to make simple switch, but the D700 sure does look good…  it’s something I’ll have consider during my off season.