Twelve Black Code Monkeys

In the professional Digital “compact” (meaning sensor sizes up to 35mm but not larger) SLR market, Nikon, Cannon, and Fuji have been battling it out for a few years now. Earlier this year, Canon took the lead, some would say, with its EOS-1D Mark II, which matched the 8+ frames per second of Nikon’s D2H, but doubling the resolution to 8 megapixels, plus a CMOS sensor that yields much less noisy images. The highly anticipated Fuji S3 Pro, supposedly coming out next month, will up the anti with a more advanced sensor that alledgedly pushes dynamic range a lot closer to the capability of film. Nikon’s D2H, which came out prior to the Mark II, has been Nikon’s top-of-the-line DSLR for professionals since then, but its 4-megapixel sensor has been superceded by most DSLR’s in the past year, even those costing a fraction of the price, and even most prosumer models as well. The Mark II is a much more expensive camera, but for newsrooms, that’s not much of an issue considering cameras with much less capability were being purchased not very long ago for $25,000 a pop!

So finally, Nikon has come out with the predecessor to its D1H and D2X - the D2H. It now incorporates a 12-megapixel CMOS sensor for less noisy images and three times higher resolution. At the full 12MP, it will only do 5 frames per second, but it has a special 6.8MP mode that pushes the frame rate back up to 8, so in this sense it is both better and worse than the Mark II – able to take higher resolution images, albeit at a slower frame rate, and lower resolution images that the Mark II can take at the same 8 frames/second.. Nikon is also touting a new advanced image processing system that is supposed to enhance white balancing accuracy. Another new feature I haven’t seen in any DSLR yet is a multiple-exposure option. One other neat feature is compatibility with GPS devices, which one can connect via an optional cable and which will encode meta data in the image file that not only says when you took it, but exactly where! Finally, one of the other big features that Nikon is talking about is the D2H’s wireless capabilities, which include support for an older WT-1 wireless transmitter as well as a newer WT-2, which is able to communicate at the higher speeds (54mbps) of 802.11G. Nikon also just announced a new wireless file transfer protocol called Picture Transfer Protocol over Internet Protocol (PTP/IP), which will make these devices much more plug and play, as well as increase their transfer speeds. We’re not quite at USB 2 speeds of 480mbps (let alone firewire 800’s 800mbps), but this is a good deal better than USB 1.0, and is bound to just increase. So far, though, Nikon is leading the way. Hopefully other camera makers will take notice not only for digital SLR’s but prosumer models as well.