S9500 vs D5000

A few months ago I bought myself a nice shiny new Nikon D5000. For various reasons I've only just pulled it out of the box and charged the battery. A potential new project, along with the desire of designer to push my current photos just a little bigger than they really should be used has persuaded me that I need more pixels, or at least more buttons on the box that takes them.

After a asking around the Nikon became the worthy successor to my Fuji S9500. The later is still an excellent camera despite being 6 years old. It's certainly better (IMHO) than the replacement in that line. The only problem us that the CCD isn't any bigger than a compact. To be fair, for 90% of my work, this isn't an issue and since I like the handling and have had plenty of practise getting the results, it will still be seeing a lot of action.

The Nikon will hopefully give me the opportunity to see my pictures blown up over A4 in a magazine and not cringe at the visible pixels. All I have to do is read the big, fat manual. For the minute, point and shoot mode will do the job along with lots of experiments.

First results are OK. This comparison is between the Fuji on manual, 80ASA, F11 and as long as it takes compared with the Nikon on closeup mode and let it work the rest out for itself. As you can see, the DSLR makes a better job of the colours (the loco is green, not bluey green) but with both images saved as JPG and shrunk to something suitable to head for Flickr, the rest isn't to different. What I know, well hope at least, is that while with the older camera, I'm at the top of the stairs of possibilities, with the my new one I'm standing at the bottom looking up.

Watch out for more experiments as the weeks go by.