Nikon is hosting a series of hands-on preview events across Japan for its recently-announced D3 and D300 cameras. Today, Zak and Shimada-san joined me for a trip to attend the event in Osaka, which started today and runs through the weekend.

I thought it'd be nice to head down in style, so after some excellent ramen on the 10th floor of Kyoto Station, we took the fastest class of bullet train (Nozomi #17) which made the trip in just 14 minutes, hitting 253 km/h (157mph), according to my GPS unit. I thought the maximum speed would be faster (the new maglev trains being tested can go well over twice that speed) but it was fun and fast nevertheless.

We arrived 25 minutes before the event was to start, and already perhaps 80 people were waiting. Most were men at or approaching retirement age. The three of us perhaps represented the youngest 4% there. Of the 80, there were two women. (I'm sure the crowd tomorrow — the weekend — will be younger, but probably just as male.)

We received a pamphlet and a piece of candy (?) and waited in line for 10 minutes, and, to our delight, they opened the event 15 minutes early.

It was not a particularly large room, but had a number of sections:

• A kiosk with half a dozen D3s and as many D300s, for hands-on play. You were not allowed to put your own memory card in, as the slot doors were covered with a small strip of tape (in Nikon yellow, no less). It would have been a fairly simple task to slip your card in when the staff wasn't looking, but unfortunately, I suffer from a slight touch of integrity.
• They had a lady playing a harp under bright studio lights, where you could use a D3 (or D300?) to take shots, then have one printed for you (Epson was there as a Nikon partner).
• A long display case of lenses... perhaps every lens in current production? There were a lot of lenses. The recently-announced super telephotos were there as well. Yum.
• They had huge poster-sized printouts of D3 pictures from the same shoots as the online sample images.
• They had a little theater/presentation area, where Nikon people spoke about, well, I suppose, cameras.
• In what might be the most colossal waste of space ever recorded, they had a small display of their consumer point-n-shoot cameras, and some accessories like camera bags.

I'll offer some superficial impressions of the D3, but first a few pictures...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — ¹/50 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Zak Compares a Nikon D3 to His Fuji S5 Pro
(The Fuji S5 Pro uses a Nikon D200 body. He has a Nikon SB-400 mounted on his.)

Here's a close-up crop. The D3 is huge....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — ¹/50 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
D3 vs. Fuji S5 Pro + SB-400

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 40mm — ¹/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Shimada-san Tries the Nikon D300
With Nikkor 18-200VR

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/30 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
BIG Friggin' Lenses
(This is only about a third of the entire display)

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 45mm — ¹/20 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Zak Receives Instruction on a D300

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 38mm — ¹/10 sec handheld, f/5.6, ISO 1000 — full exif
Zak with another D3

I've been sort of mulling about the idea of getting a D3, which has many more/better features than my D200 or the new D300, but it also has some drawbacks. I started a thread on DP Review to catalog the list of D3 disadvantages to the D300, and one that's really worried me was the D3 size. It looked to be huge.

But it's much bigger than even I worried. It's HUGE. It's MASSIVE.

My walk-around camera bag is a Lowepro Off Trial 2 with the side lens cases removed. It's big enough to easily accept up my D200 with Nikkor 17-55/2.8 with lens hood attached (the combo seen in the first big picture on the post about my tripod). I really like that it just swallows up the camera and lens with lots of room to spare all around, making it a breeze to whip the camera out, and simple to just drop it back in.

Yet, the D3 could barely fit, as the next picture shows.....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/80 sec, f/5.6, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
The D3 in my Camera Bag

(Note to self: if you do buy a D3, buy a cloth to clean fingerprints from the screen.)

Despite the size, the D3 was not as heavy as I expected. The 17-55/2.8 is a heavy lens, weighing about as much as the camera itself, so a D3 with a light lens like an 18-200VR seems airy and light to me.

I didn't even notice the screen, which is supposed to be much higher resolution than I'm used to. I was playing with the camera for a while, using the screen to pixel-peep, but forgot all about checking out the quality of the screen itself until Zak mentioned it later. It may be better than the screen on my D200, but not so much that I even noticed. (Although to be fair, it was quite dark and bland inside the room, and except for the harp-playing lady, there was nothing all to take test shots of, so perhaps it just wasn't a real-world situation.)

I liked how the D3's viewfinder protrudes out from the back of the camera, because my nose didn't rub on the screen when I looked through the viewfinder. With my D200, my nose rubs.

They put on a 17-55/2.8 for me (my favorite lens), which happens to be a DX lens, and I put the camera into manual FX mode. At 17mm, you could clearly see the image circle projected onto the larger sensor, with black all around, but by about 24mm there was only a bit of dark in the four corners. Beyond that, the image covered the entire FX sensor. I don't know the quality of the image out to those edges, but it bodes well for using a DX lens on a D3 in FX mode.

I couldn't get the Live View to work, and didn't really care enough about it to ask. I would be very interested in it for the accurate focusing while on a tripod, but that's probably about it.

My second big worry about the D3 is that it has all the autofocus points crammed toward the center of the frame, so that they can all be used even while the camera is in DX mode. Indeed, when in FX mode, you don't get an AF point outside of the center cluster, which I think is a huge drawback. As it is, I wish my D200 had wider AF-point coverage, so moving up to a D3 would be a big step down in this respect.

After all the hype, I was a bit disappointed in the high-ISO quality of the D3. I compared an ISO 1600 shot on my D200 with an ISO 6400 shot on the D3, and they seemed comparable (which means comparably bad, since the D200 at ISO 1600 is pretty bad). Being comparable at two stops faster is an amazing feat, but after all the hype, I wanted ISO 25,600 to look like it was rendered by Pixar.

In the end, I was looking for an excuse to not get the D3, since my D200 is still as awesome a camera as it was before the D3 was announced. If the D3 could have washed my windows and given me a massage, I'd have reconsidered, but since it doesn't, I'll concentrate on understanding my D200 better and wait to see what Nikon brings us in the years to come.

(Oh, and I might take the money that I saved by not buying a D3, and spend it on a nice lens of some sort )

Here's one last picture that's worth a comment, Shimada-san checking out a D300....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 22mm — ¹/15 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Shimada-san Checking out a D300, Sans Staff

We were looking at the D300 together, comparing it with my D200, and taking pictures of the nearby harp-playing lady, and comparing, and taking more pictures. At one point, I realized that we'd moved away from the kiosk, and that absolutely no one was paying attention to us or the camera. The staff, back at the kiosk, were all engaged in conversations by the surrounding horde. For easy identification, the cameras had a yellow cardboard square attached by a short length of chain, but trust was about the only deterrent to theft.

Without telling Shimada-san, I stepped back to take the picture above, then I told him to look where we were. We laughed and jokingly cursed our honesty, and returned the camera to the scrum.

I've just pushed a major new version of my Photoshop calendar-template-building script, which creates the components of a calendar as a many-layered PhotoShop document, that can then be changed and tweaked, have photos added, etc.

The version history shows lots of new things since the previous version:

• Can now create calendars in 58 languages.
• Added ability to display week numbers.
• Added ability to change annotation font name/size/color/opacity.
• Added ability to force linebreaks in annotation text.
• Added import/include/<context> support to annotation file.
• Annotation filename specifications with “YYYY” auto-convert to the calendar's target year.
• Can now include the year in an annotation's date, and have that entry be safely ignored for other years.
• Added annotation data filename to the config dialog.
• Added tool-tips to the configuration dialog.
• Added ability to save the current configuration as the local default.
• Added ability to turn off annotations in the config dialog.
• Can now leave text layers un-rasterized and un-merged.

Details and downloads are on the script's page.

With so many changes, I'm sure that there are bugs just waiting to be discovered, so I've called it “Version 3b1” (beta 1). Please report any bugs you find.

(UPDATE: I've pushed an update to 3b1; the latest is now Version 3.)

It was a lot of work adding all the new features, but nothing compared to the work required to then document them properly on the script's web page. It's just wiped me out. And then, after finally pushing it, I started to write this page and realized that I needed to build an example to show, I just didn't have much energy left.

So, for this post's example, I just grabbed one of the photos from Anthony's preschool sports day this last weekend, where he and some friends are checking out the star and medal they all received. (It's not a great photo, but I'm lucky to have gotten it, considering that my D200 suffered from dead-battery syndrome most of the day.)

Luckily, it's not yet the end of the month, so the tasty beer I wrote about earlier is still available. I think I will use the rest of the evening to research that important subject a bit more.