Well I changed my mind again. Spent my time away from the forum looking at Airy Diffraction and sensor resolution, loads of lens reviews. Did airy difraction tests on the D100 and generally drove myself round in circles. Downloaded NEF's for D70, D100, D2Hs and D2X and by midnight Sunday a D2Hs was firmly on the cards.
As a new lens was going to eat a big hole in the budget I finally decided to bite the bullet and get a D2X now as Nikon publicity shots were at f13 which is beyond the diffraction limit so figured I could handle that as I might get further down without too much image degradation. The D100 having shown distinct degredation at f16 when compared to its diffraction limit of f11.
Today has been spent proving that my lenses are up to the sensor resolution and rehoning my technique. Having read posts on other forums of how people moving up from 6mp have problems like " why are the pics from my new D200 soft " , I was not going to fall into that trap.
Pic attached of my set up. Memories of Duncans thread re focal length and min shutter speed. When I started with lens at 50mm I was only getting sharp pics at 1/125 sec and above. I have managed to drive that down to a fairly regular sharp at 1/80 sec. I will practice more, but the setup has certainly proved its worth.
The camera ...... what can I say that others that have one have not already said. The viewfinder is a revalation. With M/F lenses on I have the equivalent of a digital F3HP with similar eye relief. Performance - stunning. I have been doing some tests and recognising that some people think it noisy above ISO 400 so I attach a pic taken at ISO800 1/30 sec @ f11, NEF straight conversion to TIFF then smart sharpen and save for web. I am impressed as this image had compression set to 66 to reach this file size. The origional TIFF is 69.99mb.
I have got to sort out converting images to post while retaining EXIF info. Up to now I processed TIFF's in CS and converted to JPEG in Paint Shop Pro 8. ( Something for Stephen to laugh at
) but it worked. PSP8 does not deal well with converting the now larger TIFF's and so I did a save for web in CS but think the EXIF has gone.
Don