Buying the D1

Pre purchase
The D1 was first rumoured some while back. I decided to write my own buying specification.

When I found a leaked D1 spec on the internet I was very excited. Their spec was almost my wish list! I could use all my Nikon gear and enjoy the benefits of digital sourcing. (You may be interested to know that I experimented with fitting a conventional A4 scanner to my 5x4" camera.)

We use a lot of Polaroid and I felt that the first use would be to replace this expense and even get faster process times!

In August 1999, the D1 was supposed to arrive in September. So I placed a firm order. After a lot of chasing around the D1 was finally delivered at the end of January 2000. I was offered the 17-35 lens but chose to ignore it for now.

Purchase
The D1 came with a power pack and rechargeable battery, no film cards or the SB28DX that I had ordered with the camera.

I rushed out to purchase some FlashCards so that I could actually use the body. When I queried why none were supplied, the lame excuse was that Nikon prices were higher than High Street vendors. This is not true.

I managed to get the camera battery charged and took a few shots. First impressions were quite positive but now I wanted to see the pictures on screen.

Connection
After due review I realised that for studio use I did not want to keep passing a FlashCard from camera to computer especially to just check exposure on one frame. The picture LCD on the rear of the body is not big enough to see what is really going on.

The Nikon FlashCard adapter didn't work unless you had Windows98 Second Edition.

So according to Nikon I needed a FireWire cable and adapter.

The recommended PCI card from Adaptec doesn't go in a PC laptop.

Leeds AudioVisual offered me FireWire to Go without admitting it was a Mac only product

Grays told me that there was little information about except that `lots of folk made the camera work with a laptop'.

I talked at some length to Nikon who said it was my laptop, me, Windows or anything but the D1.

I still couldn't get pictures straight into my network which is PC or a new £2000 laptop (with mega sized screen) purchased to go with the D1.

I then found OrangeLink Micro in California and purchased their CardBus PCMCIA card with 2 FireWire sockets.

I bought an IEEE cable from Nikon.

The D1 still refused to chat to the laptop.

We played with all the settings and chased Nikon again.

Finally a man called Joe at OrangeLink cleared up the dilemma.

Nikon and Kodak made their digital cameras work with the Adaptec IEEE card. This card is not IEEE compliant and does not meet the IEEE standard for HiLink a critical part of the D1 need.

Nikon and Kodak both had to write new drivers for the Mac.

Nikon and Kodak will have to write IEEE compatible drivers for their cameras.

Neither of them will discuss a date or that the need exists. (Now they say maybe March 2000)

So beware!