Ejecutive

The first big official Nikon announcements for PMA have been made, both of which are upgrades on existing products rather than out and out new ones. A D40 DSLR upgrade and a 55-200mm lens upgrade.

D40x

The new D40x is exactly the same as the old D40 except it now contains the sensor and processing engine of the D80. This means it now has a 10.2 mega-pixel sensor as predicted, and a slightly faster 3 FPS burst rate.

Ken Rockwell will get his hands on a D40x this Wednesday, so I’m going to have to speculate on it’s performance based on what we’ve seen so far with Nikon’s cameras.

I suspect it’ll have the same image quality as the D80 and D200. If you take a shot of the same thing with the same settings and same lens with all three cameras, you’ll get exactly the same output. However I expect the D40x will retain the old D40’s 420-segment Matrix metering rather than the D80’s 1005-segment version, although the difference in metering will be minimal. Both the D80 and D40 over-expose images compared to the D200 and the D40x will be similar to the D40 and D80.

As it’ll have the same output as the D80 and D200, it should have the same high-sensitivity noise performance too, which is a great shame. The best thing about the D40 was the super-clean ISO1600 shots it produced. This made it a great indoor or night-time camera, especially when in tandem with the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens, which will even auto focus with it as it’s HSM. The D80 and D200 have pretty average high-ISO noise performance, and I wouldn’t personally use it at ISO1600 if I could avoid it.

What I suspect Nikon is doing is to set a low price DSLR to compete against the higher priced but similar mega-pixel count Canon, Pentax and Sony alternatives. Most consumers will mainly look at the mega-pixel number to decide which camera to buy, and when you can get a D40x with 10 mega-pixels for a significant amount less than a Canon 400D, if I was an uninformed consumer I know which one I would go for.

But this is not to say you’ll be disappointed with the images from the D40x. The D80 and D200 produce superb low ISO pictures, and the extra pixels will allow you to crop a bit more. Nikon have posted some samples of the D40x and they do look very encouraging.

55-200mm VR

The most interesting thing about the D40x samples however, is that most of them are taken with the new 55-200mm VR lens. This is Nikon’s first consumer VR lens¹ with a US list prices of $249.95² it’s a very cheap lens aimed squarely at consumers. But if you look at the samples taken with the D40x, you could be fooled into thinking it was the 70-300mm VR, or even the 70-200mm VR lens which costs many times more.

This lens seems to be a fantastic light travel-zoom to compliment heavier and faster zoom lenses. It has the sharpness and VR, which helps a bit with the small aperture, and it only weighs 335g. While a 18-200mm VR would be more convenient, it seems the 55-200mm trounces that lens at the long end, where it still remains very sharp.

There is still some confusion over the specifications though. It’s not specified whether it’s a VR or VRII, although it’s probably just VR. One Nikon site specifies it with a seven-bladed aperture, but on another it has a nine-bladed aperture. Also, the old 55-200mm lens didn’t have real AF-S capabilities. Instead of having a ring type motor directly rotating a floating lens element, it just had a normal motor like that driven by old screw AF-D type lenses, except this was built into the lens body. This meant it was pretty silent at focusing, but was slow and didn’t have full-time manual over-ride like that of real AF-S lenses. I suspect this is still the fake AF-S.

I await Ken Rockwell’s review as that should clear up any ambiguity with this lens, and also give us some sample shots not taken by Nikon.

The Star Trek game franchise has been pretty stale recently. Armada II was disappointment, and Dominion Wars was so boring and buggy that I nearly drove myself insane completing it.

If you’ve played Bridge Commander before then you will be familiar with the game play offered in Legacy. You command a space ship as one of Captains of all the Star Trek eras, including the orginal series, The Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine and Enterprise. It also includes some missions from after the last Star Trek movie: Insurrection.

Bridge Commander was a reasonable game, but let down badly by it’s poor selection of ships and below average story. Legacy includes ships from all Star Trek eras, including the USS Voyager and USS Defiant which aren’t even used in the games story¹ and all other major ship classes like Excelsior and Akira related to their eras.

Unfortunately, the story in Legacy isn’t that great or original either. Although it manages to spead the arc of the story across from the Jonathan Archer Enterprise era to past the end of The Next Generation movies era, it follows an overused theme of: Borg attacks Federation, Federation joins as allies with Klingon and Romulan, Allies destroy Borg.

But the problems don’t end with the story, it’s obviously an XBOX game, and the PC port suffers from it. The controls are absolutely terrible, three or four pop-up tips offered in the first mission go to nowhere near enough depth. The targeting system is terrible, you’re given the choice of choosing the closet target or moving your cursor to your chosen target, however it also puts your ships onto auto-pilot towards that target. You also cannot put your ship into reverse and a bug prevented me from selecting all four ships in my armada at once so I had to order them all individually.

Some missions involve you to target individual systems on ships, like their engines to disable them. But the method for sub-system targetting is so complicated I didn’t bother to use it. And then there’s the collision detection, or the non-existance of it, you kind of loose the atmostphere when you see the Enterprise-D bounce off a planet.

But this all pales in comparison with the annoyances with the auto pilot and map system. Firstly I didn’t know there was a 3D map available until I browsed through some screen-shots and saw it, and I had to look. There is no way to get a good balance between cursor speed on the map and sensitivity when looking around your ship. Then, setting your ships to warp to destination is unreliable, especially when you want to warp them out of danger, it can be incredibly frustrating and lead you to fail your mission when your main ship is destroyed.

But enough of the negative, at times the game is very satisfying. Seeing the Enterprise-E with a Galaxy, Excelsior and Nebula class flanking it does bring a smile to my face, and for some reason I felt a compelling urge to complete the game, which I managed to do in three days.

Maybe the XBOX version is better, as it apparently doesn’t suffer from some of the control problems, but overall this game is a big let-down. As with almost all games in the Star Trek franchise, it had potential. A lot of potential.

My new love.