Nikon D80 announced
by Volker Weber
This is essentially a D200 for half the prize, with consumer features added in. The new kit lens will take you all the way from wide angle to 200mm-equivalent zoom. I like.
Comments
that will substantially drive the D70 prices down. But the D80 specs are very nice and tempting so this will be no easy decision.
quite a nice piece of technology, indeed. there's simply one thing I really can't understand: why the hell they are switching from CompactFlash to SD-Card as storage media?
Andreas, I think Nikon has two reasons to use SD in this camera. The first is to give this camera a touch of amateur feeling, which clearly separates this model from the semi-pro D200. But this might be only a reason for people with a huge stack of CF cards or who believe SD makes a camera non-professional. Someone really interested in the D80 shouldn't really have a problem in selling the old CF cards and buy some new SD cards, shouldn't s|he? But the other reason for using SD cards might be, that there have been some complaints about CF cards and the pins that connect these cards to the device interface, which might break if you insert the CF card too roughly. As a third possible reason there might be costs and size.
One of the nice things, according to paper form, is that is seems to have something that can actually be called a viewfinder (pentaprism, 0.9x). Except of the Minolta D7 and some Pentax models, most consumer DSLR viewfinders are more like a cruelty, especially those in Canon models.
Too bad Nikon decided to abuse the distributor, dealers and customers in Holland by killing INCA (the distributor) and then offering the same wares at a 20% price increase to the dealers. Distributor (also handled repairs) folded, 20-25 people jobless. Dealers are now faced with the situation that anyone can buy Nikon stuff elsewhere below their price from Nikon, so they now have a negative margin.
And I was really looking forward to a D80...
