gear

THE DIGITAL SOAPBOX OF ANDY CLEAVENGER

NIKON D2X

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Email:  graycard18@gmail.com

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I have put this camera into semi retirement and now use it pretty much only for studio portraits. You know... like the really boring Sears/Walmart variety headshots.

It’s a great camera, but I don’t use it for anything other than real work because it’s just too big and heavy to drag with me when I want to go shoot for fun. It’s a hell of a lot smaller than the camera I had before it, though: a Kodak DCS760. That was like shooting with a cinder block.

For work I actually very much appreciate the size and weight of the D2X. The built in vertical grip makes shooting with a long tele zoom like the 80-200mm AF D or the 70-200mm VR much easier. I can’t imagine dragging this with me to Alaska, though. Believe it or not, we actually did see at least two tourists walking around with D2X’s while we were there. Some people just have more money than good sense.

The camera you see pictured above is actually a D2Xs; my second with the D2X name on it. When I got it I took the old D2X and tethered it semi-permanently to a laptop to use for our portrait studio. This was the first time I found a real shortcoming for the D2X. It SUCKS to use tethered, mostly because of Nikon’s über shitty software, but the slow USB connection doesn’t do it any favors either. Before this I was using the Kodak DCS760 for that purpose. I didn’t know how good I had it, until I swapped it out. The Kodak with its firewire connection is waaaaaaay faster at transferring files to the hard drive. And the Kodak software is a dream to use compared with Nikon’s piss poor excuse for professional software. Nikon should be ashamed to have their name on that software. It’s so slow and unstable that I’m actually considering putting the Kodak back in the portrait studio.

So, yeah...  don’t use it tethered. Unless you’re aware of some other software available for tethered shooting with the D2X. If you do know of a good viable option I’d love to hear about it.

UPDATE: I recently purchased Bibble Pro and am happy to report that tethered shooting is far more tolerable now. The download speed is still really slow (thanks to the crappy USB interface), but at least the software doesn’t seize up constantly.