Hi, Bochup, and welcome.
You say that we're the "area experts' but I don't know about that, especially as you don't tell us where you are. Please put your locality into your profile. Believe it or not, it'll make your stay here just that much more valuable.
Let's look at a few of your questions....
bochup wrote:I'm tossing up between just a plain D70 body or one of those Lens kits (especially since they have that $200 discount going on)
Some of the dealers around town will offer different lenses as "kit" lenses. Don't be fooled by sly shucksters. The only lens that is the kit lens is the 18-70mm AF DX AS. If you want to buy it separately, it's around $500 - $600, but buying it in a kit with the body only adds $200 to the body price. Subtract the rebate of $200 and that means that it's ... free.
Lenses like the 28-80 that some dealers will try and throw at you are very cheap glass, don't attract the rebate, and probably cost less than the extra the dealers want you to pay when they bundle it as a kit.
And if the lens they're offering in a bundle is not a Nikkor ... sit down on the floor in the middle of the store and start crying - very loudly - 'cos they're really trying to rip you off.
Now the spin on this is that my dad already has alot of Nikon lens gear for his Nikon F501 SLR.
He already has the following lenses:
* 35-135mm f3.5-4.5 AF Nikkor
* 80-200mm f2.8 ED Nikkor
* 24mm f2.8 Wide Angle
OK, I still have a heap of lenses for my old 35mm stuff, including the 24mm 2.8 as well. Nice glass.
The decision is a difficult one, but the bottom line is that the kit lens is excellent value - basically too good a deal to pass up.
Especially when someone else is paying for it for you.
The only alternative to the kit lens that I might suggest would be the 24-120 VR, which I bought in August.
It and my D70 body have become almost inseparable partners since then, and while it's also a very good buy and an excellent walk-around lens, I think the freebie status of the 18-70 helps this decision make itself.
So what to do?
Option A) Get a camera body only OR
Option B) Is the extra lens worth the extra dole (considering the $200 cashback). If so, which lens kit is good considering the lenses I've already got?
See my comments above. No matter what the salespeople tell you, there is only one kit lens.
Now i've read that these film SLR lenses can already be mounted on the D70.
Also read that with the older lenses for film SLRs the ?length? of the lens changes when mounted on a DSLR because the CCD area is smaller than the film capture area is this true?
There's a few things that you need to understand here, and it'll take a few days for you to completely get your head around this, so don't worry or get upset about being confudes about all of this.
Nikon film cameras produce a full frame 35mm film image. Open up the back of your dad's 501 (make sure there's no film in it first) and you'll see a recangular cutout area in the middle. That's where the light comes through from the lens when the shutter is open.
That area, by the way, is about an inch high by about an inch and a half wide, and the lenses that your dad has will fully cover that area, thus providing an image with which the film can be exposed.
Nikon's digital cameras use an electronic sensor instead of film, and that sensor is somewhat smaller than the size of the area you've just seen on the film camera, and thus, any 35mm image that you might have seen is effectively missing a small portion around all of its edges.
The resulting image is effectively "cropped", and this is what is called the "crop factor" on digital cameras. Most other dSLRs also share this phenomenon to some degree.
Nikon's crop factor is around 1.5x, and this means that, relative to a 35mm film image, to get the same sized photo you are enalarging the image (as exposed on the sensor) by around 1.5.
This is very similar to having lenses that are 1.5 longer than their stated focal length, but not quite, because you're (for instance) losing a lot of information that's been cropped out from the edges.
That is exactly how all of your dad's lenses will behave,
btw.
Because of this crop factor, Nikon have developed a new series of lenses, and these are marked as DX. By taking different design decisions, they've been able to eliminate this "wasted" light. This makes the lenses smaller and lighter, and less expensive.
Although they will give similar performance to your dad's film camera lenses on the D70, they're not designed to work on the film cameras. You need to be aware of this, but it's nothing to be concerned about.
Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 11:04 pm
