Nikon D7100 first look:

<p>The Nikon D7100 is a little bit smaller, and much lighter than my D200. There are some differences in location and function of the controls, so it will be something I will have to get used to. The shutter seems quiet enough for me - I don’t find it distracting. I like the battery charger better than the one that came with the D200. For someone who shoots in manual mode, there are a lot of what I consider to be unnecessary functions to wade through.<br /><br />None of the RAW editors yet support the D7100, so only with a little manipulation of the EXIF data and the latest version of Adobe DNG converter was I able to test the image quality. Hand-held, elbows on my chair armrest at 1/20 sec., f/11, indoors at ISO 6400, and Photoshop ACR gave me a quite acceptable image.<br /><br />Nikon View NX 2 is probably the worst RAW editor that I have tried.</p>

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<p>"Nikon View NX 2 is probably the worst RAW editor that I have tried."</p>

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<p>I've used ViewNX 2 only with D2H and V1 NEFs but so far the only uses I've found for it is to either duplicate the V1's in-camera JPEGs from raw files but with less compression, or to get b&w versions of my D2H raw files, since the D2H didn't originally offer in-camera b&w JPEGs. It's also of some limited use for converting NEFs to TIFFs for processing my older software that can't handle raw files.</p>

<p>But there's nothing ViewNX 2 can do that Lightroom 4.x doesn't do far better.</p>

If I keep my D7100--still haven't decided yet and not touching it until I do--I figured I'll get the 60-day trial of Capture NX 2,

which is supposed to do more than View NX. I'm hoping by the end of the trial that Adobe has released a Photoshop

update for the camera. Looking around on the web, it looks like the D800 and D600 Adobe updates came out within about

a month.

<p>Lex, I understand what you say. I had a friend (who passed away decades ago) who used to say that everyone and every thing served a purpose, if only to be a good example of a bad example.<br /><br />Devon, I’m not in a hurry. This gives me a little time to try the in-camera settings, and see what they do and what I like. I can take the time to download the trial versions and put them through their paces. So far, the camera looks good.</p>

<p>I might give the trial version of Capture a shot, just to see how it compares with Lightroom 4.3. ViewNX 2 can't come close to the highlight recovery of Lightroom.</p>