Nikon D2X full indepth review

As most of its die-hard aficionados will tell you, Nikon is a company that doesn’t do things by halves. As a result, any new top-end camera they create is bound to have a long gestation period. The first inkling that Nikon would be releasing a replacement for its long-serving D1X high-speed camera was unveiled. However, it took another 12 months for the new flagship D2X to be released, and a further 6 months for it to reach the marketplace. By that time, Canon had released the EOS 1Ds Mark ii which sports a 16Mp sensor; once again, Nikon was relegated to playing catch-up.

So what were we waiting for? Well, a twofold increase in Resolution, for a start. The D2X packs 12.4 effective mega pixels onto an APS-C-sized (i.e. 23.7 x 15.7mm) sensor; interestingly, the sensor is a CMOS rather than the CCDs that Nikon has used in the past. It also means that Nikon’s own LBCAST technology doesn’t get a look-in. The internal architecture has also been radically designed in order to make the most of it. It employs a 4-channel output system by which red, blue and green information is read separately by a new image-processing engine. Nikon claims this makes for a much faster response while simultaneously making for high-quality results; well, we’ll see.

The D2X uses practically the same body as its sibling camera the D2H, and in fact it’s only by reading the badge that you can tell them apart. As a result, the D2X is similarly well-built and robust; underneath its tough magnesium shell there’s a set of rubber gaskets in order to weatherproof the camera. At any rate, its build inspires a great deal of confidence and there’s little doubt that it can survive some extreme conditions.

If its build is good, then the Nikon’s ergonomics are even better. It’s superbly sculpted with faultless control placement, and well-balanced enough to use one-handed. The control interface is equally well thought-out. Nikon has gone for a mix of mechanical controls, such as the metering switch and Burst Mode wheel, and the familiar hold-a-button / scroll-a-dial electronic approach. This means that all the major shooting functions such as white balance and ISO sensitivity are easily accessible from the camera body rather than buried in a menu. Especially well-placed are the image review and delete buttons, which are perfectly located just under your left thumb. Everything falls easily and naturally to hand, and the rubberised grip makes holding the camera comfortable and unlikely to slip. On the whole, everything feels as if it’s in the right place.

What’s on the menu?

Menu navigation is simple and straightforward, with pretty much everything accessible via a single hit of the Menu button and navigation with the thumb pad. To its credit, the D2X has one of the clearest menu systems we’ve seen on a digital camera, with a truckload of useful functions. For example, a battery meter screen tells you exactly how much the battery is, how many shots have been taken since the last change, and whether it needs calibrating so that its capacity can be accurately measured. It’ll even tell you when you need to buy a new one. Two other features worthy of mention are the custom menu settings, which are colour coded to stop you getting lost, and the Recent Settings page for quick access. And even if you do get confused, there’s a Help function that gives a brief précis of the function in question. All very clever.

The thumb pad can also be used to select focus points, and it’s here that things get trickier. The AF system itself is a wonder of technology. There are 11 AF points in total, and each can be manually singly selected or grouped, or left to the Nikon’s auto setting. There’s also a welter of focus mode to cover almost every conceivable shooting situation. The usual Single and Continuous shooting modes are subdivided into dynamic and group dynamic settings, where the D2X uses information from nearby focus points to maintain a lock if the subject suddenly moves. Predictive focusing, subject tracking and closest-subject priority are also all included.

What’s more, AF performance in each of the modes is blisteringly fast. It rarely fails to obtain a lock even in low-light conditions, though it’s occasionally fooled by a low-Contrast subject. Its performance is all the more astonishing given that the D2X has no AF illuminator lamp to help it out; an external speedlight can be set to strobe to assist the camera when mounted on the hotshoe. You’d be forgiven for thinking that you’ll never manually focus again.

The shutter is just as responsive, with no lag to speak of and even less mirror blackout or vibration (though there’s a mirror lock-up mode should you feel the need). Write times are fast across all formats and the only time they really take a hit is when noise reduction is enabled; with slow shutter speeds longer than two or three seconds, this approximately doubles exposure time. It’s also possible to record simultaneous RAW and JPEG to the card, though it’s here you begin to miss a secondary card slot for backing up images. There are two levels of JPEG compression, and Nikon has also introduced a compressed RAW setting that reduces the file size by around half. It’s not lossless, but you’d be hard-pressed to notice much of a difference in quality and it certainly conserves on card space.

When shooting uncompressed, the D2X can make it up to 5fps for up to 22 frames in JPEG mode; probably as fast a most photographers will actually ever need. However the camera has a trick up its sleeve, and it’s a trick that’s likely to prove a bone of contention for some photographers. It’s called the High-speed Crop Mode, and it does exactly what its name suggests. It crops the sensor down to 6.8Mp in order to increase burst speed to 8fps. However, the major catch is that this is done by reducing the active part of the sensor to a central rectangle. This means that the Focal length multiplication factor increases from 1.5X to 2X, effectively doubling the focal length of the lens. It also necessitates the use of a bordered box on the viewfinder screen, turning it onto a ‘sports finder’ with all the problems for composition this raises. And as if this weren’t enough, you also lose the two outermost focus points.

The reason that the high-speed crop function has been implemented in this way probably has something to do with the way the data’s read of the sensor, but you don’t need a PhD to see that it could have been done much better. For example, why not just limit the total imaging size, or introduce a higher level of JPEG compression? As it is, the high-speed crop just feels like a posh version of digital zoom. But maybe it has to be this way – otherwise who’d buy the D2H? Thankfully, there are some other interesting ‘niche’ functions to make up for it, such as Multiple Exposure and Overlay modes and an intervalometer setting.

The D2X uses three different sensors to measure white balance, which require an equally sophisticated means of controlling them. Colour temperature settings in Kelvin can be dialled in, and the hue can be adjusted to look warmer of colder. Additionally, there’s room for five custom white balance settings, plus the facility to measure the colour of a light source using the external sensor. The system’s pretty accurate on the whole, and if it’s not, it’s an easy business to correct it. The same is true of the Colour Matrix metering system, which has been up rated from previous versions. There’s none of the tendency towards slight underexposure common to some other cameras, most shots being spot-on. As in the D70 and other cameras, it’s also possible to manually alter the size of the centre-weighting circle.

As for image quality, you can see it discussed in detail in our benchmark testing results. But there are a number of salient points that deserve a mention, chief of which being the astonishing lack of noise given the mega pixel count and the sensor size. The D2X is as smooth as glass right up to ISO 800, with only a mild grain structure visible and no blotchy colour patches. This increases for the boost settings, but when noise reduction kicks in (it can be turned off at low sensitivity but above ISO 800 it activates automatically, though the amount of NR can be adjusted) this is kept to a minimum, making them perfectly useable. There’s merely a slight soft mottled loss of some fine detail, but this is negligible. In fact, we thought some of the images straight out of the camera looked slightly soft, but that could have been a combination of the 18-35mm f3.5-5.6 and AF-S Nikkor 24-85mm lenses we used for this test, and that the in-camera sharpening was set to neutral. A smidgen of sharpening, either in-camera or in Photoshop, was enough to bring it good. Otherwise, resolution, dynamic range and tonal response were all excellent, with few (if any) artefacts. In all, pretty astounding.

So, why buy the Nikon when higher-resolution professional cameras are around, in particular Canon’s 16Mp flagship the EOS 1Ds Mark ii? At this level, it’s evident just what a rat-race the ‘more mega pixels’ game really is. On paper, the Canon has 25 per cent more resolution that the D2X. However, when printing out, this equates to an image area that’s only 12.5 per cent bigger – this is because when you double a rectangle’s dimensions, you quadruple its area. So that extra £2,500 for the Canon will only buy you a printed image that at 300dpi has a margin of between one and two inches larger than that of the D2X. However, the Canon’s files reach the magic 50Mb size requested by many leading stock agencies such as Corbis; with the Nikon, you’ll need a touch of interpolation (around 20 percent, to be precise) to match that.

So, on the basis of what we’ve seen, it looks like the battle lines are drawn. It’s clear though that Nikon has produced, in the D2X, a camera that’s able to hold it’s own in what’s becoming and increasingly competitive market. Given what’s on offer, the pricing is superb – you could get a D2X body and a selection of top-notch lenses for the price of just the Canon body. It’s clear however Nikon will have to start work on a follow-up right now if they want to avoid playing perpetual second fiddle to Canon; though on the evidence of the D2X, it’ll probably be worth the wait.

The Nikon’s noise performance is not as good as it should be for a camera of this level and is not what you’d expect from a professional digital SLR. Images have noise from about ISO 800 and even when noise reduction is enabled, though this means that write times take a slight hit.

RESOLUTION / SHARPNESS

With in-camera sharpening turned off, the D2X turns in a slightly softer performance in our tests than we’d expected, though the 18-35mm f3-5-5.6 lens we used for this test will have had some bearing on this. Nonetheless, it manages to achieve around 1300 line widths per picture height (LW/PH) – very respectable indeed. Boosting the interval sharpening algorithms or running Unsharp Mask in Photoshop improves matters no end.

GAMUT

Judging from the test shot, taken at ISO 100 and in neutral Adobe RGB, the Nikon appears to favour reds, yellows and greens over blues. There’s also a slight colour shift, no doubt caused by the slightly warm temperature of our flash heads. Otherwise colours remain pretty much accurate throughout the ISO scale, though at the very top they’re slightly under saturated due to noise. Apart from that, as good as it gets, with no nasty surprises.

TONAL RESPONSE

Judging from the test shot, taken at ISO 100 and in neutral Adobe RGB, the Nikon appears to favour reds, yellows and greens over blues. There’s also a slight colour shift, no doubt caused by the slightly warm temperature of our flash heads. Otherwise colours remain pretty much accurate throughout the ISO scale, though at the very top they’re slightly under saturated due to noise. Apart from that, as good as it gets, with no nasty surprises.