D40X

I just got a new camera. My old SLR was a D50, which did the job well, but after holding a D40 in my hands on Friday evening, I realised I could not resist such a cute little SLR. I went for the D40X though, to get some additional pixels.

My trusty old AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm lens still works, and so far I think the combination is excellent: a really flexible lens with vibration reduction and the smallest SLR I have so far held in my hand with 80% more pixels than my old D50. Perfect for travel and even to carry around, as one takes a quick walk around town.

I had considered a D300, which I also got the opportunity to hold in my hand recently. I admit that the D300 is a marvellous machine - superior in almost all ways to the D40X, but it is heavy. It is nothing you grab along when you go for a quick walk to the nearest bakery. The D40X is such a camera.

There are people who claim that the additional pixels in a D40X compared to a D40 are a waste. The additional pixels are "only significant if you're printing larger than 13 x 19" (30 x 50 cm) and larger" they say. However, I never print anything. I use the additional pixels to better be able to zoom in and crop small details of photos. In no way am I a fan of huge amounts of pixels for standard photos. I use the lowest possible resolution, unless I know I need more, and when I need more, I usually want as much as possible for the flexibility and joy of zooming around and cropping heavily.

However, it is undeniable that the larger number of pixels sometimes causes problems. I took some pictures of the carnival in Nice today. As I never knew what details I would want to zoom in on, I started off taking NEF (RAW) pictures. Soon a realised that my 8G SD card would not be big enough for all the pictures of the day. I took 800 pictures - roughly as many as I had planned to take. Each NEF is around 7M, and I already had some pictures in the camera to start with. Changing to JPEG with the same resolution, I got the file size down to about a tenth, and that is much more reasonable - even if you loose some flexibility.

The software that came with the camera is rubbish, by the way. It is Nikon's standard "PictureProject". I never used it with the D50, but I wanted to give it a second try. The installation failed over and over again. The error message was something with the shared library "zelkova3". There is a "fix" at Nikon's support site which does not work. My crime was to use the "Installer" instead of the idiotic helper application which launched the installer. Apparently the helper application did some other necessary things as well, which the "Installer" did not do. Besides, Nikon's support site sucks. I had to send a mail to myself to get the right URL to the article. Anyhow, PictureProject is a waste of time, so do not bother trying to make their error prone installers work. That way you will be much happier.

My copy of Photoshop is CS2, and that version cannot read NEF files from D40X. Luckily Preview can do it. So can Aperture and of course CS3, if one has them. I have not yet managed to write any AppleScript to convert from NEF to JPEG.