There is a multitude of reviews on the Nikon D80 to be found on the internet, but the following are the ones that I’ve found to be the most comprehensive or otherwise have unique bits of information.
- Nikon D80 Review, by Phil Askey of DPReview.com – absolutely the best review there is, with all features and functionality listed and elaborated upon. You even get to listen to an audio clip of the D80 firing continuously on Page 5.
- Fantastic Nikon D80 Review by Thom Hogan
- Nikon D80 Review at DCInside.com, a Korean website. This is my favourite, simply because a huge number of full-sized images, straight from the camera, are made available there (wait for the slow-loading page to load fully – the thumbnails to the image samples are near the bottom of the page); from night scenes, to indoor shots bathed with artifical lighting, to the outdoors under cloudy conditions. The D80’s colour and automatic white balance performance holds up very well, definitely far better than what my D70 can achieve without further tweaking from the photographer. You might also like to follow a related discussion at DPReview.com.
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dc.watch.impress.co.jp has various articles reviewing the Nikon D80 (see the index here). Although they’re in Japanese, a wealth of interesting shots to be found there, not least of which are the full-sized ISO series test images; you absolutely have to see the ISO1600 and ISO3200 images – they’re fantastic, with almost zero chroma noise and acceptable luminance noise characteristics (you can read a related forum discussion thread here). For comparison purposes, these are quick links to test images with » Nikon D200 | Canon 30D | Sony Alpha A100. There are also photos of the D80 from every angle, a shot of how an SD memory card looks like when inserted into the D80, and some vanity shots of the D80 with various lenses (my favourite is the one with the AF-S VR ED 200mm F2 G mounted on the D80). Towards the bottom of the page are comparison images of the D80 body vs D200, D70s, and D50. There’s an interesting picture of the back of the D80 vs the D50 – the larger viewfinder of the D80 is very clearly visible. You’ll also notice the plastic lens mount of the AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor ED 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 G IF (which was one of two lenses announced simultaneously with the D80).
- Nikon D80 Review at journal.mycom.co.jp – not just another Japanese review, because this one has many full-sized image samples captured with the D80 + AF-S DX 18-135mm F3.5-5.6G lens (just too bad that only ISO100 shots are posted up). I like what I see from the out-of-the-camera JPEG images though – great colour and automatic white balance performance, fantastic detail, and not too shabby performance from the 18-135mm lens (bokeh and corner-to-corner sharpness is very, very good). It’s best to view the images using Nikon View as the full exif (standard parameters as well as Nikon DSLR-specific information such as image optimization parameter) can be seen. It’s also suggested that the D80 exhibits higher resolution than the Nikon D200 digital camera.
- I believe that Digitalreview.ca is the first site to publish image samples taken with a production Nikon D80 Digital SLR camera. Most of the pictures were taken with the Nikkor AF-S DX 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G IF-ED lens, but the one which impresses me most is the executive-style portrait shot at ISO1250 (!!!) and a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D AF mounted on the D80 – excellent noise characteristics » free from chroma noise, and pleasant luminance noise; about the only downside to that photo is that it has been downsampled to a 6MP-equivalent image, so I’m looking forward to similar images posted up at 10MP.
- Nikon D80 Experience Report at OutbackPhoto.com.