As followers of this site are aware, I’m no longer really posting photo news or links to other sites.  But now and then I come across something so good that I have to bring it to your attention. Here’s one of them, an editorial written by Nasim Mansurov over at Photography Life about Nikon – about great products, bizarre product decisions and bad quality assurance.  The article makes several key points and I’m going to post some excerpts here but you should really read the whole thing.  The first bit is about some of the features on the D7100 vs. the D600.

By using the 51 point autofocus system on the D7100, Nikon demonstrated that it costs nothing to use a high-end autofocus system on any camera. So using the lower-end AF system on the D600 was intentional, similar to the 1/4000 shutter speed or the 1/200 sync speed limits. Nikon clearly did not want the D600 to compete with the D800, so it crippled the camera by stripping off important features. Did you really think it was a move to keep the cost of the D600 low? You would be very naive if you thought so. Even if there is a cost difference, it is very minor. Not in the hundreds or thousands of dollars that Nikon wants you to think.

The small buffer limitation of the D7100 is also equally intentional. When the D7100 was announced, I made a hasty statement that it possibly marked the death of a high-end DX line. After I discovered the buffer limit on the D7100, however, I reconsidered my thoughts. Why would Nikon intentionally cripple the D7100′s buffer capacity? Another ingenious game by Nikon’s marketing – get plenty of attention to the D7100 so that a lot of people buy it, but cripple it enough for sports and wildlife photographers to either have them switch to the expensive D4, or wait until a D400 comes out (if it comes out). Do you really think that extra buffer memory is going to cost a lot of money? Of course it doesn’t.

But I think the part that really grabbed my attention and made me want to share this post is further down, his “lessons learned.”  They include:

• Stop pre-ordering gear
• Use your camera until it dies
• Don’t pay attention to new product announcements

and a couple of other bits as well.

Me, I’m trying to get off the whole consumer merry-go-round thing.  I look back at some of the insane moves I did – things I bought too quick or sold too quick to buy other things – and I’m trying to change my ways. I admit that in no small part this is enforced by my budget, which means thinking more and trying to act less impulsively.  Stay tuned, we’ll see how it turns out.

Nikon Rumors has a post about dust spots on the D600′s sensor, taken from a post by Lensrentals saying there appears to be a heavy concentration of dust on the upper left portion of the sensor, not just on one or two cameras, but on many.  Lensrentals says, “D600′s shutter curtain opening seems a bit larger than the other Nikon cameras with a bit of a gap around the shutter curtain. It may well be the shutter movement is pulling dust onto the sensor.”  Nikon Rumors adds:

Just a reminder that many of the first D800 cameras also had an unusually high amount of oil/dust spots on the sensor. It seems that this issue was resolved with later shipments.

They also point to Amazon’s D600 listing and the reviews there (49 5-star reviews out of 66) and how some of the reviewers are mentioning issues with dust and oil.

There are, as of this writing, 54 comments on this post, many from people (including myself) complaining about similar problems with the D800.  I can tell you that in the year that I owned a D300 and the 2-1/2 years I owned a D700, I never needed to bring either camera in to Nikon for cleaning.  I’ve never needed anything for those cameras other than using the “clean sensor” function from the menu.

However, I’ve had to bring my D800 into Nikon twice in the six months that I’ve owned it.  I’m pretty careful about holding the camera down when I change lenses, not changing lenses in a windy or dirty environment, all the stuff one is warned against.  I use the “clean sensor” function and a Rocket Blower and still see an incredible amount of schmutz on the lens when viewing it with the Sensor Scope (which is proving to be a very useful accessory).  I purchased the Visible Dust brush but I think I have the oil problem and it seems to just smear that around.   I have some of the swabs but they don’t seem to resolve that well.  Then again, having brought the camera into Nikon twice for cleaning, one would think that they’d spot this and mention it to me.  Well, I have to bring the camera back to Nikon for focus calibration (another frustration) and will print out the article and ask them about this issue and see how they respond.

It is incredibly frustrating to know that a $3,000 product can have such poor quality control.  It’s frustrating to read that the issue was resolved with “later shipments” which means what to me, exactly?  That people like myself who thought themselves lucky to get the camera early on are now screwed, since there’s no official word from Nikon about this?

I’m certainly not ready to sell off all of my Nikon gear (9 lenses, speedlight, battery pack, etc.).  And I’m certainly happy with the photos that I took over the weekend with the D800 at The Wanch’s anniversary shows (taken, incidentally, immediately after taking the camera to Nikon for a cleaning).  But given that these issues first arose with the D800 and have continued with the D600, I’d have to think long and hard about buying another Nikon DSLR in the future.