[Aris A]

does anybody heard or read any news or articles from Nikon if they will introduce dslr bodies to swap with your non dslr but still compatible with the lenses? It would be nice and a whole lot easier for anyone who would like to transition to digital capabilities but with limited cash to afford a full dslr kit. Maybe Nikon would introduce a model but it might be expensive.

[Man-Fai Wong]

AFAIK, ALL of Nikon's DSLRs have been compatible w/ their F mount autofocus SLR lenses (and also 3rd party lenses). The only main issues about compatibility w/ their recent lineups of the past few years are:

1. The lower end bodies like D50, D70 and the older D100 did not provide metering support for their manual lenses and will require manual focus lenses to be AI capable -- you can often get a fully manual lens enhanced to be AI albeit at some significant cost. IOW, if you have AI manual lenses, you can use them in full manual mode w/ those lower end bodies.

2. Due to the DX format of all Nikon DSLRs to date, you will experience the ~1.5x crop factor on all your SLR lenses, so your 35mm wideangle lens will behave like a ~45mm normal lens in terms of FOV. Basically, the outer parts of the image circle is effectively cropped away. The effect will make it seem like your telephoto lenses get a ~1.5x telephoto multiplier, and most people treat it as such. And on the wide end, well, you'll probably need to buy a new wider angle lens to compensate for the crop factor.

Also, if all else are equal, the crop factor yields a smaller viewfinder in the body. So you should expect to see a smaller viewfinder from a digital body that has design comparable to a film body counterpart. If viewfinder size is important to you, you'll probably want to go w/ the D200 or higher for a Nikon body, especially if you also want to use manual lenses.

_Man_

[Man-Fai Wong]

BTW, Nikon DX (digital/DSLR) lenses are really just 35mm SLR lenses that are designed to work best w/ their DSLRs (primarily due to the crop factor though there are other lessor issues involved). You can generally use a DX lens on your Nikon film SLR w/out any real problems AFAIK, except that you will experience varying degrees of vignetting in the images depending on the specific DX lens used and the focal length chosen for the shot. For instance, I read that the 12-24mm DX is quite useable w/out vignetting on a film SLR from ~18mm on up. And of course, nothing stops you from simply cropping away whatever amount of vignetting in your final output.

_Man_

[Rob Gillespie]

If you mean a 'fulll frame' D-SLR like Canon's 5D then there's word on the Flickr forums that something might be happening this year.

Whether it does or does not happen is open to speculation. The one thing that is for sure is that it'll be too expensive for me, but I can't honestly say it would make much difference to me anway.