My frustrations with the D100 stem directly from me using a
prosumer / amateur camera in a professional capacity, and is not a negative comment on the D100 itself, which I think is a lovely and capable camera. It's more about HOW I was trying to use the D100.
I shoot weddings mainly, so I needed certain functions which the D100 lacked, and which the D2H fulfilled to a large extent.
My specific frustrations were ..
1. No PC sync on the D100.
This is a very important point for me.
(Before you react by coming up with work-arounds, read further.)
I use additional strobes (either Quantum strobes or Dynalite studio strobes) in addition to my on-camera Speedlight. I trigger them with radio slaves. To get around the lack of PC terminal on the D100, I initially tried to hook the Quantum 4i radio slave to the Speedlight's PC terminal, but I got all kinds of weird camera and flash behaviours with this .. all caused by the 9V from the radio transmitter fighting the 4.5V on the Speedlight's terminals .. which would dip to 0V whenver the flash is triggered .. all with 9V still being fed to it from the radio sender.
Here's a recent image, directly as I shot it with the D2H, without any post-processing other than resizing.
To counteract the brightness of the sun, I had to pump out a fair amount of flash .. more than the Speedlight on its own would've been capable off. In other words, I NEED to trigger other flash units in addition to the Speedlight. This would've been difficult / impossible with the D100.
2. The small buffer of the D100.
I shoot in NEF only. (With the D2H I now sometimes shoot NEF + JPG, but the NEF is my primary file.) The D100 has a buffer of only 4 NEF files. With the D2H, even if I shoot with Noise Reduction ON as a default, and NEF + Lrg JPg, my buffer is only reduced to 16 shots ... which for most kinds of photography, is pretty much unfillable, especially at the speed at which the images are read out of the camera's buffer to the CF card. In other words, the buffer of the D2H is as much as I would ever need.
3. Flash sync speed.
The D2H has a flash sync which is ever so slightly higher - it's only a half a stop more speed, but I'll take what I can get.
4. Auto-focusing speed.
Okay ... the D100 was pretty good, and there are no focusing issues with the D100 like there is with the Canon 10D, or back-focusing problems reported with some D1x bodies. Auto-focusing on the D100 works, and it works well .. but it's NO comparison to the D2H.
The D2H is a revved-up Ferrari in terms of auto-focusing speed, and it pretty much latches onto anything I point it at. Sometimes it surprises me by focusing on a bland subject with little detail. Amazing.
5. The small D100 viewfinder.
I came to the D100 from the F90x, and always hated the small viewfinder. The D2H viewfinder goes a long way towards correcting this and giving me the large bright viewfinder that I was accustomed to on the Nikon film bodies.
6. The layout and controls of the D2H are more logical.
For example, with the D2H, I can change WB and ISO without going out of my shooting mode. Then for example,
there is the multi-function button on the front that can be programmed to do a variety of things. I have it
set to disable the flash, which is ideal for getting a photo with flash, and another without any flash.
The D2H really is so much more versatile than the D100.
That pretty covers my immediate frustrations with the D100, but doesn't touch on many of the other features and advantages that the D2H offers over the D100.
After regularly using the D2H, it's difficult using the D100 now.
Please feel free to e-mail me.