A long term review of what is now a old camera.

In around 2004 I finally got around to looking into and purchasing a updated camera to replace my film camera. I had been looking into digital cameras for years at that point and while they were neat they where either too expensive or didn’t take good enough photos to make it worth looking at using one full time. 

I did have a couple of smaller ones over the years, a Olympus that I don’t recall the model of and a A75 that was good enough, but they were all missing the controls and handling of a “proper” camera. 

When looking at options I was initially looking at a Canon option, however since none of my older film lenses would have been able to be used I did start looking into other options and at one point I was handed a Nikon D70 and the feel and ergonomics of that camera basically sold me on that specific piece of hardware. 

I initially purchased the device as a part of a kit with a 18-70mm lens and eventually added a 55-200 AF-S VR, a 50mm, and a 100-300mm Sigma Lens into the bag. A Nikon SB600 flash head was added at some point along with a pile of other random accessories that were bought to fill out the bag. 

The camera body itself worked great and I shot with it for almost 20 years, the camera handled weddings, kids, vacations, and all sorts of other events over the years without giving me any huge issues or problems on it’s own. Even after almost 20 years of use the only thing that’s really an issue with the body is that the rubberized coating that is on the high touch parts of the body degraded to the point where it was sticky and unpleasant to touch. That was fixed by simply scrubbing it off the plastic with IPA, but aside from that the camera still works to this day. 

As far as the lenses, none of what I bought over the course of using the camera was what would be considered a “professional” lens, but that 18-70mm and the 55-200mm gave me great service in all sorts of conditions without any problems. The 50mm lens was, in retrospect, something that I should probably have held off on, but I wanted a prime lens and I had been shooting with a 50mm on my film cameras for years, but I didn’t take into account the crop factor of the camera body when buying the lens. Given that the body has a 1.5x crop factor that makes that 50mm lens a 75mm effective field of view and that wasn’t a lens that I had shot in the past. What I should have bought was a 35mm lens since that would have worked out to be effectively a 52 mm lens with the crop factor. 

While the camera did work well for me there were some gripes that I had; 

• The D70 never did release a battery grip, I’m not sure why but the camera didn’t even have a external trigger for the shutter and from what I can tell they never did put the appropriate connectors in to support a remote shutter on a vertical grip. 
  
  There were some 3rd party ones but they mostly just added battery capacity, nothing else since there was no way to trigger a remote shutter from the grip. I did see one that seemed to use a piece of optic cable to redirect a IR signal into the body but that never sat as a great solution. 
  
• The camera didn’t work really well with larger compact flash cards, leaving me having to mostly rely on smaller 512mb cards, and even with the smaller pictures from the 6mp sensor I would still burn through all my smaller cards fairly regularly. 

In the end the camera still worked 20 years down the road, however a few other things gave out. The autofocus screw on the Sigma 100-300 telephone lens eventually stopped working, making that lens a manual focus only one. The SD cards started showing problems with being read and mounted – and larger ones just didn’t really work reliably. And the batteries were basically burnt out to the point where you can’t really shoot for long with the ones that I have. 

All of these things are “fixable”, the replacement batteries aren’t horrendously expensive, provided you don’t get the Nikon branded ones. The CF cards can still be bought in sizes that should work, but either they come from a vendor that I’ve never heard of or cost as much as cards that are significantly larger. The Sigma lens was not something that I used enough to really be terribly upset about loosing autofocus on it, and it was cheap enough that getting it repaired would cost more than I spent on it in the first place. 

Eventually I wound up replacing the camera with a newer Nikon late in 2025, and that’s still a work in progress. 

The D70 is still around and will remain in the collection along side my film cameras, and it may get trotted out from time to time. I can’t however complain about a piece of technology that I’ve gotten 20 years of use out of though. 

It does kind of reinforce the idea of purchasing something, paying once, and crying about it once rather than picking up cheaper solutions over and over again.