Dear Imaging Resource -- since you have had your hands on both the nikon 950 and oly 2000, could you please offer an opinionated head to head comparison? They seem quite similar in a number of area, maybe you could just offer brief comments where you noticed any major differences or preferences. Subjectivity and bias welcome. :)

-- Benoit (foo@bar.com), February 16, 1999

Answers

Hi Benoit- (And thanks for your contributions to other threads!)

I'll reserve the opinion - I like both a lot! The major differences I see between the two (leaving out image quality, which we really don't know about yet) are in focusing and exposure flexibility. The Nikon wins on focusing, with a manual focus option. Nikon touts "4746 steps" of autofocus accuracy, but I really question the validity of that measurement - I'm sure that it *has* 4746 steps, but what's the depth of field of the lens? Could you EVER see the difference between step number 3732 and 3733? I doubt it. (No slam on Nikon though, I'm sure their autofocus is very accurate, I just object a bit to the mindlessness of some of the specsmanship.)

The Oly wins in the area of exposure flexibility - you can set either shutter speed or lens aperture in 1/3 stop increments across the entire range. The Nikon is limited to 3 different apertures on the lens, period.

A personal-preference issue might be the overall design - the Nikon swivels, the Oly doesn't. Personally, I could happily go either way. A trivial item: The '950 makes you take it off the tripod to get at the CF card, the Oly's media compartment opens to the side.

A lot of other factors are completely unknown yet: We haven't been able to test the Oly's images at all, and the '950 is admittedly a prototype unit, with a bit more noise in the red channel than Nikon believes will be in the final units. Also, neither of the prototypes we tested had their variable-ISO features working properly.

Don't know if this was what you were looking for, it's still pretty equivocal...

Stay tuned though, we're promised one of the first full-production C-2000 Zooms, as well as one of the first full-production 950s, so should be among the very first to have *vaid* comparison images up. (A side note: The pictures on Dreamarts were all taken with prototypes as well, so the image quality may not be truly representative of either device.)

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), February 21, 1999.

That's exactly what I was looking for, thank you.

-- Benoit (foo@bar.com), February 25, 1999.