At $999, Nikon’s D70 has turned a lot of heads and started a great deal of gossip in the digital camera social scene — enough to ruffle feathers at Canon, who's EOS Digital Rebel was until recently the best deal around in terms of quality, options, and price. Although the price extends past the $1000 mark when a kit lens is thrown in ($1299), the Nikon D70 offers up stiff competition nonetheless. Arriving on the scene two years after its predecessor, the Nikon D100, the new Nikon D70 adds a lot of new features and improvements to an already acclaimed line of digital SLR cameras.
Picture Quality / Size Options(8.0)
The Nikon D70 offers the following quality settings: basic, normal, fine, NEF (RAW), and NEF+ JPEG. RAW format records exactly what the sensor sees while the file is compressed to a smaller size, but does not lose any data in the process. Similar to the Canon EOS Digital Rebel, the Nikon includes an embedded JPEG format that can be extracted once the image is downloaded onto a computer. The image size options are Small (1504 x 1000), Medium (2240 x 1488), and Large (3008 x 2000). They are a little bit smaller than the options offered by the Canon EOS Digital Rebel, but not by much.
Picture Effects Mode (7.5)
The Nikon D70 Digital-Vari program offers a wide variety of image optimization options available in program, manual, shutter, and aperture priority modes. You can choose from normal, vivid, sharp, soft, direct print, portrait, and landscape to optimize their settings according to image type. Within custom, you are given the opportunity to adjust sharpness, contrast, color reproduction, saturation, and hue. Most people won’t bother adjusting these settings for the majority of their pictures, especially since the default settings usually do a pretty good job, but it’s nice to have all the options there when you want them.
