E2 Owners of the World - Unite!

[Brian Sweeney]

The E3 arrived, in great working condition and cosmetically near mint. Good think I have a 28mm F2; vignettes like crazy with the little 35~80 zoom.

I "think" that the "F-Stop/ISO equivalent" is some game played by Nikon to account for the ROS. I suspect the sensor is on par with the others of the period and without the ROS would be an IWO 100 or 200 equivalent. The ROS shrinks the image and makes it brighter. The Circles of Confusion for DOF also shrink, so the relative "F-Stop" to compute DOF changes. My head hurts thinking about it. I have a Polaroid Back for my Nikon F that does the opposite. I plan on trying a few lenses with same focal length and different max F-stops. If it really is an F4.8 max, I should get the same shutter speed on auto with an 55mm F1.2 lens or 50mm F2.

Have any of you guys tried this?

[Stan Disbrow]

The E3 arrived.....I "think" that the "F-Stop/ISO equivalent" is some game played by Nikon to account for the ROS.....The Circles of Confusion for DOF also shrink, so the relative "F-Stop" to compute DOF changes. My head hurts thinking about it.....I plan on trying a few lenses with same focal length and different max F-stops.....Have any of you guys tried this?

Hi,

No, I never thought about it much beyond the part where the ROS shrinks the image circle, raising the light level at the CCD, and so my E2 has ISO 800 and 3200 on it. I never stopped to think about COF and DOF considerations before, but it does make sense that's why the effective f-stop is what it is.

And you're right. This sort of thinking is good for producing headaches. I have to retreat into the world of mathematics, along with sketching a few diagrams, before I wind up truly understanding most technical concepts. Oh, and for me anyway, the retreat into mathematics is how I avoid the headache part.

When I bought my E2, I had an old FE and a couple of FA's on hand and a bag of old AI'd, AI and AIS manual lenses. I wanted to try an 'electronic still camera' because I was unhappy with any commercial film processor I had tried since I moved in 1994. Before that, I had my own manual wet darkroom, and I was spoiled by that, and wanted to process my own stuff again - but without putting an addition onto the house (as in build a new darkroom). That meant digital, computers and printers.

Anyway, I found a deal on an E2 for $750 in late 1999 and bought myself a Christmas present. See, it was (a) electronic and (b) happy with all my old lenses and (c) not too costly (the D1 was $5k and still hard to get at that time, and the Kodak stuff was even costlier). I thought it was a great deal, even if it is the size of a cinder block.

The only real testing I did was to run each lens through it's aperture range and see what worked OK and what vignetted - something you're rapidly finding out about!

I never did run any sort of of DOF or even resolution testing. I knew from a retreat into the aforementioned world of math that my usual ISO 100 film had more than 10 megapixels worth of 'digital-equivalent' resolution and, of course, the poor E2 had 1/10 that.

So, I figured it wasn't worth the effort and never did do it. I accepted that the thing is what it is, and does what it does, and just used it for a while. Actually, what it really did for me was prove that I'd screwed up when I bought it and should have gone for the D1 at 6x the cost! It also proved that I was on the right track thinking digital was the way to go vs. a film processing darkroom.

As it worked out, I did wind up doing some DOF and resolution testing on the D1 and the Kodak 460 during the summer of 2000. That showed that even a 3 MP, half-frame DSLR was a match for the usual color print film up to an 8x10. The 6 MP on the 460 was a good match for color positive film.

By that time, though, the E2 was sitting on the shelf as a 'collector's item' because the used prices had dropped so low that it wasn't worth selling off. So, it didn't come out to play during those tests. It was a couple years later, when the wife wanted to put an on-line store onto her screenprinting business website, that the old E2 came back out of the closet and had a job to do again. However, there was no need to test anything at that point. I was after VGA sized images, and the E2 puts out a SXGA one, so it was more than up to the task.

Later!

Stan

[Brian Sweeney]

Well, The 50mm F1.4 and 55mm F2.8 Micro-Nikkor (Both AIS series) produce the same shutter-speed in "A" mode.