Thursday, June 7, 2007

Nikon D80 - For the Serious Photographer!

Photography is one of my hobbies particularly while on my traveling adventures in India! For this reason, I bought a Sony DSC-H2 Digital Camera (you can read the review here). The Sony DSC-H2 is a wonderful digital camera that produces quality pictures and I am really happy with it. But, I want more! You see when you are a technology geek like me, you get to see all sorts of state-of-the-art gadgets! When it comes to gadgets, you can never have it all or have enough! Introducing the Nikon D80:


Image Source: Nikon-D80

The Nikon D80 is a semi-professional digital camera priced at Rs.70,000 (including the lens kit). It comes with a 10.2 effective megapixel CCD, a large 2.5inch LCD screen, and a 18 - 135 mm Nikon DX zoom lens kit which will provide you with nice sharp images. The camera has a sturdy feel to it. The size and weight of the camera are slightly smaller than its predecessor the D70.

The menu of the Nikon D80 has all the standard stuff like the playback menu (delete, playback, slideshow), shooting menu (sharpening, tone compensation, saturation...), setup menu, and custom settings! However, the most interesting is the retouch menu. The retouch menu allows you to manipulate your saved images including increasing brightness, red-eye correction, cropping, and color balance. But the coolest part of the retouch menu is the image overlay setting. This allows you to put one image on top of another so that they blend with each other. A really fun setting to play with!

The camera also has the PictureProject software allowing you to adjust color, brightness, and sharpness including minimal raw editing of the picture. If you want even greater control over your images, then you will have to fork out some money for the advanced software!

But, before you use these settings, you have to take a picture. The Nikon D80 will produce very high quality pictures along with excellent detail and colors. You can always tweak certain settings like the manual shutter speed or the ISO settings to improve your pictures. The camera also does well in extreme conditions including action shots. Furthermore, the camera produced very little noise for high ISO sensitivity settings.

The performance of the camera is outstanding! The auto focus worked well with the Nikon D80 and I couldn't notice any shutter lag whatsoever while taking pictures. Continuous shooting was a breeze. According to stats, it can produce 6 RAW or 100 JPEG images at just under 3 frames/second!!

The battery life of the Nikon D80 is good but remember that it will only accept Nikon batteries. I could only play with the Nikon D80 for a few hours so I couldn't tell you exactly how good the battery life is. But, I would expect the battery life to be excellent given that the Nikon D80 would be utilizing the powerful EN-EL3e battery.

Conclusion: The Nikon D80 provides high quality pictures and backs it up with spectacular performance. I would highly recommend this camera to anyone who is serious about photograph

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