| > I suspect if you do a wedding shoot with a 6mp interchangeable lens camera, some customers are rightly going to ask questions when you hand over the work... Unless you're printing A3 pages, getting gigantic pictures, or cropping aggressively, D70s can still hold up pretty well [0]. > even lens systems get deprecated every 20-30 years too. Nikon F mount is being deprecated in favor of Z because of mirrorless geometries, not because the lenses or the designs are inferior (given the geometry constraints). Many people still use their old lenses, or nifty fifties are still produced with stellar sharpness levels. I'm not entering into "N" or "L" category of lenses of their respective mounts. Not all of them are post 2000 designs, or redesigns, and they produce extremely good images. > Newer sensors have vastly more dynamic range than the d70s among other image quality benefits. As a user of both D70s and A7III I can say that, if there's good enough light (e.g day), one can take pretty nice pictures with a D70s, even today. Yes, it dies pretty fast when light goes low, or it can't focus as fast, or can't take single shot (almost) HDR images (A7III can do that honestly, and that's insane [4]), but unless you're chasing something moving, older cameras are not that bad. [1][2][3] > I think you argument holds water much more strongly in the context of amateur users, where for sure you can keep getting nice images from old gear for a long time. Higher end, action oriented professional cameras are not actually built with resolution in mind, especially at the top end. All of the action DSLRs and mirrorless cameras up to a certain point are designed with speed and focus in mind. You can't see A7R or Fuji GFX series in weddings or in stadiums. You'll see A9s, Canon 1D or Nikon D1 series cameras. They're built to be fast. Not high res. A wedding is more forgiving, but again a high MP camera is not preferred since it's more prone to vibration blurring. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku3lT8MjyFM [1]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/41901384135/in/album... [2]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/28459579257/in/album... [3]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/39910477633/in/album... [4]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/33984196648/in/album... |
> Unless you're printing A3 pages, getting gigantic pictures, or cropping aggressively, D70s can still hold up pretty well
You even qualified that later with "if there's good enough light" and "unless you're chasing something moving". No, a D70 won't work well for wedding photography. Yes, people shot weddings with much slower film. They don't anymore because, like the D70, slow film is obsolete. People shot weddings with manual focus lenses too and the D70 is awful for MF lenses from the tiny viewfinder to the lack of support for non-CPU lenses. When the D70 was a current product some people did (make no mistake the D70 was never marketed as a pro body) simply because the D70 was on par with its contemporaries.
> Nikon F mount is being deprecated in favor of Z because of mirrorless geometries
Even within the scope of the F mount the D70 is obsolete — it's incompatible with new E and AF-P lenses.
> A wedding is more forgiving
Wedding photography is about the most technically challenging, least forgiving (low light, constant motion, spontaneous behavior) type of photography out there. The point you were responding to still stands – older digital photographic equipment is obsolete in a professional context while having some utility for hobbyists. Nobody's taking a D1 out to shoot sports these days. In fact most people didn't when it was new because Nikon's autofocus was so far behind Canon's.