electronics Nikon D70s Kit opinions and reviews

Nikon D70s Kit

An upgrade to the highly popular D70, Nikon D70s encompasses essentially the same features with a few exceptions. Purchasing the D70 kit will give you the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G IF-ED lens (135 equivalent of 27-105mm range).

D70s features a better battery capacity compared to its predecessor apart from a superior menu arrangement. Despite the visible improvements, understanding the menus might not be that easy and hence referring to the user manual is essential.

With the battery and CompactFlash card in place, D70s weighs 2.5 pounds. The bigger 2-inch LCD is of good quality and is highly discernible in brightlight.

A mode dial gives you the option to select from among programmed automatic, fully automatic, manual, shutter-priority modes or the Scene modes which comprise Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Night Landscape etc.

The other standard functions like resolution and compression, ISO, white balance can also be utilized without opening the menu system.

Fully automated mode and default autofocus will be more than helpful for the greenhorns while the more experienced photographers can try their hand at the Digital Vari-Program (scene) modes.

Among the other features also present in D70, you will come across the 6.1 MP sensor, its compliance with other lenses fitting Nikon's F mount and also the facility to shoot in Nikon's RAW mode i.e. "NEF".

Shutter speed of D70s is between 30 seconds to 1/8,000 second while the maximum ISO sensitivity is 1,600.

Using the CompactFlash card, you can store 9 full-resolution shots taking just about 4 seconds in the Fine JPEG compression setting.

In normal shooting mode, you can take snaps at 1fps while with flash, shot-to-shot pictures require 2 seconds.

Starting up D70s takes around 0.6 second and shutter lag was just 0.35 second in bright light. The focus assist lamp is useful in dim shooting environments.

Featuring the AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G IF ED lens, the D70s kit gives out excellent picture quality. Colour representation is pretty much accurate with the correct amount of brightness and sharpness. Even at very high ISO ranges, the noise disturbance wasn’t terribly bad.

A bit of vignetting may be seen at 18mm while at 50mm, there is some barrel distortion. But that doesn’t deteriorate the quality of the lens by much. Exposure and white balance are also good in most shooting conditions.

Using the 18-70mm lens, the Nikon D70s does a good job of being a successor to the excellent D70.