There are only two REAL digital interchangable SLR to choose from. Nikon D1H or D100. If you are not a photojournalist, needing to carry your gear to desert war zone, and extreme environments. You don't need the ruggedness of D1H, which is based on the F5 body. If you don't need the insanely large memory buffer of D1H, D100 will satisfy all your need.

D100 has higher resolution than both the extremely fast D1H and the higher resolution cousin D1X (but slower), at half their price. The only thing that's lacking is a smaller memory buffer, hence slower, and a slower flash sync at 1/180. Unless you're doing a lot of daylight fill-flash, I wouldn't worry about this limitation.

Since the D100 is based on the N80, it's comfortable to hold and use. The user interface is so much better than Canon's. It's more ergonomic and comfortable than the more expensive Canon too. Not to mention that Canon's is lacking a playback zoom feature which I find it very important in Digital. You don't want to download your photo to your notebook computer every dozen shots to examine the details and sharpness, do you?

Of course, it can use all your Nikkor lens. (That's the main reason I'd never buy Contax, Pentax or Minota's digital camera. Their lens selection is just too limited.)

Just buy it and you'd be happy.

Definetly not a Pro (Rating: 5.00)
Review : I'll be the first to tell you I'm no professional but so far this camera has been amazing. For the past four years my wife and I have been using the Nikon N60 and it has more than met our needs. My decision to switch to digital was based on 2 important points. First, we found 16 undeveloped roles of film around the house. After realizing it would cost well over a hundred dollars to develop them and I know we won't like at least half the shots, we decided we needed to move to digital. Now with the D100 I can pick-and-choose exactly which shots I keep, retouch, crop etc then download them to someone like Walmart.com. For exactly the same price I end up with the exact pictures I want. Up to now I refused to get a digital because the N60 takes such beautiful shots. Past digital cameras' shutter lag was so bad you'd have to predict where a moving subject is going to be when you hit the button. What sealed the deal for us is the D100 has no noticable lag, and it uses all the lenses we already had for the N60.

The D100 looks and feels just like my old N60 only lighter. It acts and sounds just like a 35mm SLR, the camera internals are the same except with a sensor in place of the film strip. In fact a co-worker, and long time digital user, was checking it out and couldn't figure out why it was "all blurry" when he looked through the view finder. He also had a hard time finding the "zoom button".

I highly recommend this camera. If you were reluctant to switch to digital because you loved your old SLR then this is definetly the replacement for you.

Awesome. This camera heralds the death of film. (Rating: 5.00)
Review : This is an awesome digital picture-taking machine, which heralds the imminent death of 35 mm film. The D-100 does pretty much everything that a high-end film SLR does, and it does it beautifully. A 512MB CF card will enable the D100 to take hundreds of high-quality pictures that are indistinguishable in quality from those taken with film. The Six-megapixel images in Large/Fine or RAW mode are quite competitive with their film counterparts for almost all purposes. The advantage of digital, of course, is that the consumer, equipped with pretty much any computer, can process and print the pictures him or her self with far more power and flexibility than one had in a darkroom processing film. The digital darkroom has arrived.

The D100 can use Nikon's entire line of autofocus lenses and many of the older manual focus lenses, allowing the photographer to easily migrate from film to digital. The camera has spot, matrix, and center-weighted exposure options, a programmed mode, apature priority or speed priority, as well as all of the manual options. Autofocus is crisp, fast, and works very well in low light. This camera is nearly as powerful in terms of its focusing and exposure options as the Nikon F5, which is the film camera I used for years before replacing my F5 with the D100.

Perhaps the greatest testimonial for the D100 is that it is notorious that the vast majority of photographers who I know who have bought a D100 never (or at least rarely) shoot film ever again.

The D100 takes OK shots right out of the camera, but to get best results most photographers will want to "process" the pictures through either Nikon's own program "Capture 3" or an aftermarket program like Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. I and probably most others have found that some of the post-processing settings on these programs really improve the images produced by the D100. This is a deliberate design "feature" of the D100 in that the D100 anticipates that serious photographers wish to retain a certain amount of control over their images. Accordingly, rather than making all of the decisions for you, the D100 produces images for which final exposure and contrast decisions can and should be made in a post-processing program such as Adobe Photoshop Elements or Capture 3. That having been said, the D100 can and does produce fine images without using a post-processing program. But almost all users have probably found that the best results are achieved by using such a program. In my opinion this is true of pretty much all of the high-end digital cameras out there, and is not confined to the D100. This is the power of digital photography--the photographer, at little cost (a low-end PC and $100-200 program are all that are required) can have a powerful "digital darkroom" which yields tremendous control over how the images turn out.

Physically, the D100 is ruggedly built. The rear LCD is bright and clear. The menu systems on the D100 are very well designed and quite intuitive--after familiarizing myself with the manual for several hours, I now find that I do not need to refer to the manual at all even for very complex "custom" situations. The menus are not overly "layered" as is the case with some digital cameras. The on-board flash is fine for snapshot portraits and the like, but most serious users will want to spring for either the SB-50DX or the SB-80DX flash, both of which are more or less designed for the D100.

Negatives on the camera are few. I mentioned above the post-processing issue, which in my mind is not a negative, but instead is just Nikon giving the photographer as much power and flexibility as possible. The matrix metering is not as powerful on the D100 as on the top-of-the-line F5, inasmuch as in tricky lighting situations the D100s center-weighted or spot metering will sometimes yield better results. Having said that, after several hours of experimenting I can now confidently take consistently good pictures with the D100 in fill-flash conditions. In common with the exposure issues, the D100 more or less requires photographers who want very "sharp" images to apply "sharpness" post-processing. Most of us have probably found that this produces better results than setting the sharpening in-camera, for reasons that exceed the scope of this review.

By the way, the battery life in the D100 is phenomenal. The on-board proprietary Nikon battery lets you take many hundreds of pictures, and serious shooters can buy at modest cost the MD-100 accessory which lets you shoot with either 2 Nikon batteries or a bunch of AAs. Either way this allows you to literally shoot all weekend likely without needing to recharge. The Nikon batteries recharge in a bit over an hour.

For good reason the D100, retailing now (October 2003) below $1,500, has put powerful digital photography in the hands of serious amateurs. It is a well-designed and sturdy camera that is a delight to own and use.

A Camera that is very versatile (Rating: 4.00)
Review : This was my first digital SLR. I use Nikon film SLRs regularly, I have an F5 and an F100. The build quality of the D100 is very good but isn't up to the standard of those two chunks of heavy metal photographic excellence. It takes terrific photographs, however, with good Nikon glass and I am afraid film is going to become the buggy whip of the early 21st century . Its controls are fairly intuitive if you are used to the Nikon pro-quality film SLRs. If not, there will be a learning curve. All in all, I like very well indeed.

Camera Good-Nikon Service is terrible (Rating: 3.00)
Review : Obviously from the other reviews the camera is fine. The problem is if you have a problem with it. My auto-focus gave out about a week after the warrant ended. I was charged $775.00 to repair it. Nikon kept it for 38 days. Sent it back and never reapaired the problem.

They took it back worked on it for a week- waived the $293.00 charge. Guess what? I am on holsd with the service department as it was sent back with the same problem.

Speaking of service forget about ever speaking to a real person unless you have 2-4 hours to kill.

never again .