D-40 ... Nikon is playing the old gamut game

Nikon's new camera favours quality over quantity

"SOMETHING interesting is stirring the pixelated world of digital photography. One of Japan's most respected camera companies is challenging the trend to cram ever more pixels on to each new digital camera's photosensor chip. Until now a high pixel-count has conferred certain bragging rights: more pixels are assumed to mean sharper images, which can be blow up into bigger still-sharp pictures.~

So, why would Nikon want to turn the clock back with its latest offering, a 6.1-megapixel SLR called the D40?~

Nikon is playing the old gamut game—something it mastered while working with photographic film. The gamut of an image is the range of colours in it that can be detected, represented or reproduced in some way. In practical terms, it's what's left after an image has been mangled by some output device such as a photographic developer, ink-jet printer, computer monitor, television tube or movie projector.

The gamut of film is much higher than that of a CCD. But when turning the images into something we can see, film and CCD alike come up against a common restriction that pretty well wipes out film's natural advantage—the gamut of the output device."



http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8435209

How is the "shutter speed" on the D40? Any personal experience? My Cannon seems to take forever to snap a photo and always misses the intended action.

Flavio

The D-40 has no "shutter lag". One of the major advantages of a HIGHER end digital camera (SLR that is).

Interesting... about time some one tackled the dynamic range of the image sensors.

Lack of dynamic range is what has kept me away from serious digital cameras, thus far.

Traditional film, minus the grain, still does it for me. The wide gamut and dynamic range of traditional film still outdoes digital, but looks like Nikon may have something on their hands with this new approach.

The dynamic range on this one won't be displaying anything truly groundbreaking as far as dynamic range in DSLRs goes. It's the very bottom end Nikon DSLR made to sell for cheap. While physically the photo sites are larger than some of the higher megapixel DSLRs and while the dynamic range from the sample photos is good, it's not substantially better than many other DSLRs out on the market right now. The article paints a little too optimistic of a picture for me.

For now I'm happy using RAW and bracketing for the scenes that require something extra in the dynamic range arena. That said I'm certainly looking forward to the sensor related solutions that are being developed (no pun intended).

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/nikon/d40-review/

I'm glad the megapixel wars are coming to an end. Now instead of seeing how large they can make the image, perhaps we'll see how clean they can make it.

I am waiting for the D90

My camera club had a salesman for a pro grade raw image processing program come and give his demonstration. He had some images made with a Hasselblad digital back ($10K+) that I can't recall the pixel count but was either 24 or 32 bit per pixel. There was detail in the brightest highlights and there was shadow detail on the undercarriage of the Fire Truck in the photo which was in shade from overhead light. Of course that was a very large image file, 44 megs if I recall. Of course it had Hassy lenses in front of the sensor which helps. I have Nikon, Leica and Hassy for film. Sorry to say that Nikon images are "normal" compared to the quality of the other two lenses images. Likewise I haven't pulled my D100 out of the case since purchasing my Sony R1 with the Zeiss lens attached to it. The program in the camera and the lens mean I have to fiddle less with the image than I do with the Nikon. The Nikon only gets used when I need more or less lens than the Sony and I need zero shutter lag.