An amazingly strange camera. The camera takes AF Nikkor and AI Nikkor lenses, weighs almost 2 kilograms with battery installed, and shoots 1000 X 1280 images. It has one big advantage over many more modern DSLRs; there is a built-in optical system that reduces the image from the lens to fit the digital sensor, so there is no lens factor. Unfortunately, many lenses vignette, and how much they vignette depends on the aperture, which is set on the camera body, not on the lens. You can see this effect in all of the images here, some more, some less.

Announced by Nikon in 1998, delivered in 1999, at about the time the D1 was first delivered. Apparently its original price was about $US 8,000, while the D1, with 3 MP and a smaller, lighter body was about $5,000. Not surprisingly, total production appears likely to be in the hundreds or very low thousands, from serial numbers collected and viewable at http://www.nikonweb.com

A true dinosaur of a digital SLR.