Design flaws - Suggestions to Nikon

The following are a number of suggestions to Nikon to improve their product designs.

There are two categories of design flaws to me:

	[design right]

	[right design]

An important disclaimer as well: I don't want to give the impression that Nikon is not developing the products in a proper way, but improvements are always possible.

Known problems with a few recent cameras.

• D70 is known for the BGLOD problem (blinking green light of death). The first production batches all suffer from this. After some time, and this could be one to two years, your camera will stop functioning with the green LED blinking. The camera has to return to Nikon service to be repaired (this has to do with bad connections inside the camera). The problem has been solved and does not appear in the last year of production or in the D70s. Important to know: Nikon repairs this for free even outside the warranty period, because they admit that this is a design issue.
• D200 has had a serious problem during the first production week, called the "banding" problem. Many early adopters had to send their camera back to Nikon to get this fixed. The problem was that horizontal lines (like interference lines) were appearing next to very high contrast areas in a picture. I still have this issue in my camera but extremely rarely (5 pics out of 30.000 exhibit the problem when doing pixel peeping but it is still there under extreme circumstances). This problem has also been fixed free of charge by Nikon.
• The D200 grip has a problem: the small white plastic piece holding the batteries on the right side breaks after some time. Many people have that problem and in many countries, Nikon does not recognize the problem and charges a ridiculous amount of money. Because of the number of occurrences, this is definitely a design issue.
• D2H has exhibited problems with metering after some time. There also the camera has to be sent back to service to get the metering sensor replaced. Once again, this is taken care of by Nikon even outside the warranty period.
• D2X - some copies have had AF alignment problems. Those have been solved pretty quickly. Other than that, one of the most reliable cameras in the Nikon DSLR lineup.
• D3 - not too many problems until now - some people have had issues with the mirror blocking after some time (mainly when using the high speed mode for a long time), but number of occurrences seems limited - a few other small problems with the first batches as of today, nothing to worry too much about.

Design mistakes

• The worst example of user interface is the joypad of the D200. Close to impossible to use to enter data. The pad is moving in all directions and used to click. It is really very difficult to click without moving, making text entry a total nightmare. The system is extremely badly design and just ridiculous. Nikon has proven their incompetence in that area by re-using the same "worst design ever" in the D300, a real scandal... The system used in ALL their other cameras, including the cheap D40's is factors better.
• others to be added soon...
• User interfaces are relatively inconsistent, even in the same generation of products: the D300 has a zooming function similar to that of the D40, unlike the D200, while the D3 has a user interface similar to that of the D200. When using several bodies (for instance a D300 as a backup for the D3), this is making your life much more difficult.
• The bank switching mechanism on a D200 is useless, because you cannot store any settings and recall them later. Any change stays forever. The possibility to store has been added in the D300 (this has always been correctly implemented in the D2 camera range).
• The dust issue in the D3: they should have thought of a better concept: a full frame sensor is a dust magnet and the chamber is small, making the cleaning more difficult than with a crop sensor. Moreover, a lot of dust even greasy stuff is coming from the inside of the camera, and this is just unacceptable - I really hope Nikon will design a better system for their next professional generation.
• Nothing had been done against vignetting in the D3. This has now been partially corrected with the recent firmware upgrade, but the problem is still there, it does not really help with the 70-200VR used fully open for instance. Some vignetting is still visible and the settings are not clear (a level of correction is selectable, but no clue is given about the actual effect).
• The whole AF system of the D3 and the D300 is a problem: it is totally counter-intuitive and invisible to the user. The 3D tracking is wrong most of the time and there is no way to see what the system does. On the D200 for instance, you can see the sensor clusters in the viewfinder. I consider the fact that the sensors (groups of sensors) not being visible in the viewfinder, a MAJOR step backwards compared to older cameras. Overall performance of AF can be better in the D3 generation, the D2 generation was better designed from a user perspective.