Playback out of focus on another camera

[kaliuzhkin]

<p>The players in this drama are a Nikon D1, a Nikon D300 and a Transcend CompactFlash 133x 2GB media card.</p>

<p>I'm getting to know the D1 and like it! I took it outside for a walk yesterday and came back with several nice, crisp pictures of flowers. All are in NEF format. In playback, they look fine, as fine as they could look on that puny LCD screen. (IMHO, playback is a shortcoming of the D1.) On the computer (Paint Shop Pro, Nikon Capture NX2, Windows Live, Picasa) they look great. See for yourself.</p>

<p>However, if I put the card in a Nikon D300, the pictures all look a little bit out of focus.</p>

<p>What's the problem? Could it be different NEF's? Could it be that the D300 doesn't have the latest firmware?</p>

<p>The pictures are attached. I did not edit them in any way except to reduce the size and convert from NEF to JPG, in accordance with Photo.Net requirements. This was done in Nikon Capture NX2.</p>

<p>I can't figure out how to attach them, so here's a link.<br>

<a href="/photodb/folder?folder_id=1054483">http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=1054483</a><br>

<a href="/photos/kaliuzhkin">photo.net/photos/kaliuzhkin</a></p>

[mark_sirota1]

<p>Cameras are not designed as general purpose playback devices. It is unreasonable to expect a camera to play back files shot on a different camera.</p>

[ShunCheung]

<p>Right, I too am afraid that the OP has unrealistic expectations.</p>

[Dieter Schaefer]

<p>I'm surprised the D300 can read the D1 NEF files at all!<br>

Why bother with displaying the files taken with one camera in another anyway?</p>

[mike_halliwell]

<p>All you're ever seeing on the back screen of any camera, is a JPEG, even if you take only RAW...it's that image that gets messed with. Without meaning to sound pedantic, RAW is a file format and NOT an image type. You cannot see a RAW file....it needs converting.</p>

<p>I can view Panasonic JPEG images from my P&S on my D300, but they're really pixellated and pretty horrid. The D1 is pretty old school by now and that cannot help either.</p>

<p>If you take JPEGs with the D1, how do they look on the D300??</p>

[Andrew Garrard]

<p>This could be misinformation, but do the NEFs from a D1 have thumbnails in them? If the D300 is displaying the thumbnails and nothing else, you'd have a very low resolution image being scaled to what it might have detected as the original size. I could certainly believe that it's trying to give you 12MP's worth of zoom in on a 2.7MP image, which would certainly look - at best - soft.</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Right. The D300's much higher-resolution LCD is being asked to display the very low-resolution JPG that's embedded in the D1's NEF files. The D300 is crudely up-sampling the D1's embedded JPG preview/thumbnail, and the result is a slightly murking-looking "stretching" of that small preview JPG.</p>

[kaliuzhkin]

<p>This sounds a little bit like the A: disk issue that came up when I was working for the Navy, in the early 1990's. Our computers were in various states of disrepair. (This was a consequence of hiring the low bidder for our repairs.) It turned out that if you took a disk formatted on machine #1 and used it on machine #2 for writing, it would occasionally mangle various files. Some applications would read or write only from a floppy, so this made some processes difficult.</p>

<p>I think my reason in wanting to display on the D300 images I captured on the D1 is that the D300 playback setup is better than the D1 playback setup. The former is 3" x 3"; the latter is 2" x 2". On the former, you can zoom in and pan; you can't do that on the D1.</p>

<p>Would this difficulty apply to the same model cameras, as my A: drive problems did, or is it only different models?</p>

<p>Mike asks, "If you take JPEGs with the D1, how do they look on the D300??" I don't know. I haven't tried it yet. I have two types of compactflash cards: SanDisk Extreme IV and Transcend 133x. The former works only on the D300. It does not work on the D1. The latter works on both. Unfortunately, the latter is very slow. Although the files on the D1 are much smaller than files on the D300, uploading or downloading the former takes a few seconds and u/d the latter is almost instantaneous. That's because of the transfer speed and its very frustrating. I'll try this experiment: expose on D300, view on D1 but I wouldn't expect much. After all, could a camera designed and built in 1999 anticipate file format for a camera designed and built in 2007?</p>

<p>Andrew asks, "This could be misinformation, but do the NEFs from a D1 have thumbnails in them?" I don't know and how do I find out?</p>

<p>BTW, what do you think of these images? I like them more than pictures taken with the D300. The lens used was a Nikkor 85mm f/2.</p>

 

[kaliuzhkin]

<p>"Mike asks, 'If you take JPEGs with the D1, how do they look on the D300??'"</p>

<p>I did the experiment and the D1 reads, "Card contains no images."</p>

[frank_skomial]

<p>Cameras are not computers, and usually have very limitted memory management algorithms, that are specific to maker camera body. They are not designed to move around memory cards between different cameras, even if from the same maker.<br>

Even if the basic file system is the same, the pictures could not not be usable on another canera.</p>

<p>If you insert memory card containing pictures from one camera, into another camera, certainly you are taking your chances.<br>

Some pocket cameras would immediately start to format memory card, if it is not strictly recognized as from the same camera. Inserting memory card with pictures from an old Casio camera, into newer Casio camera, resulted in attempt to format the card, and if not cautious, you could easily loose your pictures.</p>

[rodeo_joe1]

<p>Nothing to do with a "disk issue" Danek, it's simply that digital cameras are designed to display their own image files, and not those created by another camera. For example I can view, but not magnify, pictures from my D800 on my D700, and not vice-versa. My D700 will even allow me to see smudgy representations of pictures taken with a Konica-Minolta A2 bridge camera. However the K-M can't "see" the pictures from the D700. Does that bother me? - No, why would it?</p>

<p>As Frank says, transferring cards between cameras <em>might</em> run a slim risk of the card being automatically formatted. This has never happened to me over several different cameras that all accept CF cards, but they almost always add their own folder into the DCIM folder without warning or option of veto.</p>

[Ian Rance]

<p>Try pressing the zoom in button once - that usually helps scale the image and reduce blur. Sometimes the problem is that the image from the original taking camera do not exactly match the resolution of the playback one.</p>

[kaliuzhkin]

<p>"Cannot zoom on this image."</p>