Nikon D60 Second Edition

As someone below has pointed out, the gold could be something to do with Nikon celebrating 50 years ? I think they just had a 75th for Nikkor (?) so maybe we can look forward to a diamond special edition too ?

If you only read to that section, why comment? You may have found something in the article that was interesting or perhaps the very last sentence of the article reads “This article is a joke and if you comment you are a banana”. Who is a banana now if the article had stated that?

Also, I think you have mis-spoken (or written in this case). You write, “I stopped reading after that…” Really, did you go on to read much more or even all, OR did you mean to write that you stopped reading at that point?

CLARITY IN YOUR POSTINGS PLEASE. NO GOLD STAR FOR YOU TODAY BRIAN THAT IS BRIAN.

try shooting your D700 at ISO 3, 6, 12, 25, or 50, unlike any film SLR’s.

The poster isn’t the one making these statements, they’re just the latest “news” up on Rockwell’s site. What I find even funnier, is his post from March 1:

“Newswatch: Nikon D5000 expected Tuesday, and the D700x/D770 are possible, but less likely, too.

If these become real, I should have my hands on them late Monday.”

So Ken is implying that Nikon will toss him the new toys a day before the release date. Of bodies that weren’t released.

Cutting through the photographer’s sarcasm that you write with, you forget though that the production and discontinuation of products relates the the new market only. There are so many film cameras out there for sale and in use that there is no need to keep producing more.

Remember, there are still more film cameras still in active use, than there have been digital cameras ever made.

My friend shoots for commercial clients including Harpers magazine and he does all his commercial work on film. A colleague of his does the photographs of the ‘Scottish Widows’ life assurance giant model that has been running for years and they have to change the girl every few years. He does all that on film too. The people I know who shoot commercially on digital are PJs – whether they be for the newspapers or for sports websites or magazines.

Digital is really just for playing around and having fun which is fine but I know of nobody that uses digital for commercial purposes outside of the aforementioned and I suppose wildlife shooters (though don’t know any so can’t really comment.)

You may be a professional musician and you may think you like analog over digital sound, but I would maintain that you know little about the physics of analog and digital sound and that you are basically quoting stereotypes (sic) about each:

>>>Digital will never be able to capture the dynamic range and resolution of an analog format. This goes for electronic amplifiers, recorded audio, and visual media.
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While not always used because producers want their recordings to sound “the loudest”, so digital recordings are heavily compressed, digital media has the capability of a far greater dynamic range than analog. A Redbook CD is capable of 90 db of dynamic range. An LP is capable of about 35db. Similar numbers are true for stereo channel separation.

As far as frequency response is concerned, digital also kills analog. While Redbook audio can never reproduce anything over 22,050 KHz and analog can always be “tweaked”, most often, analog audio isn’t reproducing anything much over 15K (and that’s before it gets to the loudspeakers).

Analog recordings made without Dolby noise reduction have incredible amounts of tape hiss. Analog recordings made with Dolby almost always have Dolby tracking problems because few engineers bothered to get the levels right. When the levels aren’t right, you can hear the Dolby “pumping”. All this goes away in digital.

Furthermore, everyone thinks they prefer analog until they take a double-blind A-B test. Then they always pick the CD. And I say that as a former recording engineer who still has a 700 LP collection and a working turntable in my living room. We think we prefer analog because we remember how thrilled we were when we first opened that new LP in the technology available at the time. But like the paisley shirt or the bell bottom pants that we thought were so beautiful at the time, it just doesn’t hold up. Every time I listen to a CD of an old album and the CD just doesn’t give me the thrill that I remember from the album and I go back to the LP, the LP sounds far worse.

The “warmth” often associated with analog recordings and/or tubes actually comes from 3rd harmonic distortion. You take a rounded wave, you record or play it back at too high a level, , the system runs out of steam and “squares” the top of the wave (or you get analog tape saturation), making it into a square wave. This is exactly what a fuzz box for a guitar does. We love that sound. But it’s not accurate. It’s distortion.

(Compressed formats, such as MP3s, are another story. While they may sound okay on small systems, plug them into a high-quality, large amp and speaker system and they sound like crap. Luckily, Apple and others are moving closer towards “lossless” formats.)

As far as theatrical presentation is concerned, digital and analog each have their advantages and disadvantages, but I would maintain that the rock-steady, dust & scratch free and evenly lit digital images would be judged superior over almost any analog presentation by just about anyone, even if film still does theoretically have better dynamic range in the color and higher resolution . (Although color dynamic range is almost a moot point as virtually all color movies made today are purposely desaturated. If the Technicolor 3-strip process every comes back, then yes, I’d far prefer to see those movies on film.)

It’s not that traditional projection can’t be great, but it rarely is. In fact, in most movie theatres, even in prime cities like New York and Los Angeles, the film projection, and if you don’t see them on the first day, the film prints, completely suck. I would agree that 70mm projection was superior to current digital projection, but the last film actually shot in 65mm was in 1992 and the last film presented in 70mm (aside from IMAX) was in 1994. In all of U.S. film history, there were only 64 films shot in 65mm and approximately only 279 films that were “blown-up” from 35mm to 70mm and there were usually only around 20 70mm prints released of each film. I think the most 70mm prints ever made were around 200. Everyone thinks they first saw Star Wars in 70mm, but unless you lived in a large city and sought out a 70mm theatre, you didn’t.

And digital projection is constantly getting better. The new 4K systems are supposed to be really amazing.

Where I would agree with you is television. Analog broadcasts (although those are going away soon) presented on digital TVs are incredibly awful. Even DVDs look awful in my opinion. Blu-Ray looks amazing, but it’s clarity takes away the believability of most motion pictures: it seems to turn movies into the look and feel of soap operas, although this can be corrected on the better sets. And there definitely are still movement artifacts, especially in long shots and even on TVs that have 120-Hz refresh rates, although I believe this issue is a technical issue in the sets that will be solved over time as it is not a storage or format issue, but a screen issue.

So-called HD presented over the web has its own problems. Look at a night scene in an episode of Lost on the web and you see all kinds of horrible digital “blocking”. But I would suspect this is because the streams are over-compressed. But that’s a moot point too because you can’t send analog over the web.

But analog television has its own set of artifacts: ghosts, screen distortion, noise, etc. And most people have their analog TV sets adjusted to completely the wrong color temperature anyway.

But on balance, from both a physics standpoint and from how the art and science is practiced, digital is superior to analog. I would love to believe otherwise because my “emotion” is tied to analog, but it’s simply not true.

Ho hum! I said I might find something else to comment on re your prolific replies. I just did not expect it to be the next thing I read.

Well, I work in the movies and most movies are definitely not shot digitally. Quite the opposite in fact.

Correction. Slumdog was only partially shot on digital. Though incredibly some of the scenes were actually shot on a digital compact camera, so that they could obtain those shots ‘under the radar’ as it were.

However, Slumdog won its awards more for the feeling it produced in the viewers rather than outright artistic content or for being a particularly great movie. As one colleague put it, “Sometimes there is a movie that is just right for the time and it can’t do anything wrong in the eyes of the people…” Slumdog, well, Slumdog is one of those movies.

We have a saying in the industry about movies generally – but the Oscars and such like are a microcosm of the same and it carries over – we say,

“There are fun movies and there are handsome movies”

The ‘fun’ movies, even when they land an Oscar never go on to be remembered as great movies while the ‘handsome’ movies whether they win an Oscar or nothing at all, always are destined for greatness.

It may change over the years – though I have my doubts – but at present almost all movies are still shot on film. I would love to take you to a screening or even show you some dailies on a set and do some takes with a digital camera too just to let you compare. I think even you would be forced to eat your hat. Truly, it is like comparing chalk and cheese, night and day or anything else that is so obviously different as to ordinarily need neither discussion nor comparison.

>>>Not sure whats going on, but everyone I know is shopping for, just bought or scouring the internet for 35mm film SLRs. My initial thought is that it was just coincidence but reading the posts here and on a few other sites I read, there is a definite pattern.
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That’s total B.S. and the danger of interpreting comments made on specialist websites like this one as typical of the market as a whole. If that were true, film cameras would be commanding high prices on sites like eBay. But they’re commanding incredibly low prices: you can get a Nikon F3 for $100-$300. F4s go for $100-$400. And many go without being sold. You can get an N80 (F80 outside of the U.S.) for as little as $30 with a lens. Those prices do not signify a demand for these cameras.

Furthermore, even before the recession, did you look at Kodak stock prices? Kodak is hardly selling any film and they have been continually discontinuing film formulations, although they did just recently release a new Ektar 100. Kodak is down to only 28 35mm formulations. They used to have over 100. Agfa has only 8 (if you can find them) and Fuji has about 26, but all three of these companies are in deep trouble, at least in the photo divisions. I’d say by the end of this recession, two of them won’t be in the business of making film anymore.

You cannot judge the market by looking at “fanboy” websites. If you read sites like this one, you’d think the potential market for Nikon and Canon to sell incredible numbers of lenses is enormous. The reality is that according to CIPA stats, only 1.59 lenses are sold for each body sold. And for Nikon, the number is even lower: for the first 3/4 of this fiscal year, it was only 1.39 lenses sold for each body (including the kit lens).

I still have an F3 and an N80 and I won’t get rid of them, but the reality is that it’s very, very rare that i use them. I will give film cameras one advantage (although it really has nothing to do with film vs. digital): it’s that there were a lot more fast (1.2, 1.4) lenses. My favorite setup was shooting with an Olympus OM-1 and a 50mm 1.2.