I’ve finally taken the plunge and ordered a Nikon D7000. Adorama is good enough to take the order and ship when they get stock, unlike a lot of other online retailers. If you’re going to get one, find someone you like and use their reference links to shoot them some cash in these hard times. I used Ken Rockwell, mostly because I couldn’t think of anyone else, and Ken serves as a good guidepost along the route to camera discovery.

Ken gives really solid advice – as long as you keep in mind it’s his unvarnished, personal take on the situation. For example, if you don’t make a living taking/making/selling images, you are not a professional photographer. If you don’t know why you need the new, shiny camera, you don’t. The best way to get more high ISO performance is spend the cash on lenses. All of this, I get behind. He also does very thoughtful reviews of lenses and camera bodies, pulling out better numbers about how much you really get from VR II (hint: it’s not 4 stops). So, I’ll shoot him my cash when moving along from one body to another.

Bringing up Ken Rockwell, however, brings me to the dark side of the Internet. There is very, very, very little trustworthy content out there. People on forums who zoom in to %100 go on about how you should trust that the read noise at ISO 100 on the D7000 is so low, you should ALWAYS shoot at ISO 100, and boost in post processing. I can’t even begin to explain why that fails when looking at basic physics. To further the stupid, Rockwell says you should shoot in JPG, not RAW. He advises boosting the saturation and sharpness inside the camera, before the JPG has even been written out to card. He calls sensor self-cleaning useless, as it’s never helped him before.

Having shot JPG on a trip, out of necessity, I’ll never do it again. It’s hard to measure what I would have shot, had I been shooting RAW, but lacking any depth of dynamic range and tonal range made all the images wash out pretty badly. I was already up against my limits (ISO 1600 and f/1.4), and at those levels, JPG is stealing more and more. Having had to touch up 400 images of a weekend due to a particularly nasty bit of sensor dust, I’ll take a sensor that takes care of itself.

Just stay sane folks, and think for yourself.