I've been thinking of making a whole "I love my D70" web page, but that's not going to happen until things calm down at work. In a nutshell:

- The camera is just fast. You turn it on. It's on right now. No waiting. You shoot. You press the button and it shoots. You press again, it shoots again. I've never once had to wait while it was writing out to the memory card, and I shoot exclusively in RAW mode.

- The 18-70 kit lens is pretty good. The extra wide-angle is quite useful (27mm equiv.), and the focusing is fast and quiet. Focusing on one person in a crowd can be an exercise in frustration, however. There are three focusing modes, and none of them are "just use the center focusing target and ignore the other four." Maybe I'm just picky, but I've found myself needing focus manually on far too many occasions, and the screen isn't one of the traditional ground glass / split screens that makes it easy to focus.

- The SB-800 flash is the best thing since sliced bread. You can put the camera into "commander" mode and the flash into "remote" mode. You can then hold the flash in your left hand, the camera in your right, and everything pretty much just works. The flash also comes with a frosted white dome thing that gets you a smoother light distribution if you want it. You also get filters to match the flash to incadescent or flourescent lights. The camera, by default, tries to use a slower exposure such that the flash is only a "fill" flash. If that's what you want, it does it brilliantly. If you want a bright foreground and a dark background, using the camera's tight 1/500 flash sync, you have to put the camera into manual mode.

- Internet weenies (particularly on the dpreview.com forums) complain about moire and about backfocus. I've never seen moire, ever, but I shoot RAW, which is one of the known ways to avoid the problem. Backfocus hasn't been a problem for me. The finicky focus system, when it works, is spot on. When it doesn't work, it's usually quite sharp, just not on my intended subject. The focus system will highlight the focus zone that it thinks it's using. This is usually fine. The real trick with this camera is when you realize that pressing the button is free, so you just start shooting like you're a member of the paparazzi. Shoot 30 pictures and one or two will turn out good in the end.

Edit: adding some more information, now that I've had a chance to think about it.

- One annoyance of the D70 camera, and of any D-SLR, is dust. When you change lenses, you allow dust to get on the sensor. This manifests itself as fuzzy, out-of-focus blobs on your pictures. You can usually Photoshop around it, but you often need to clean out the fuzz if you like to change lenses. One thing the Nikon does apparently better than its competition is that you can force the mirror lockup and clean out the camera without it needing to be plugged into the wall. I bought a can of compressed air, and that seems to be doing the job nicely.

- Another genius feature is the automatic ISO adjustment. I have it set such that it will stick with ISO 200 (its minimum) until the automatic exposure time that the meter demands would be longer than 1/30 second. At that point, it will start pushing the ISO until 1600. Only after that will it go with a shorter exposure.

- At some point, I intend to buy myself Nikon's 10.5mm fisheye lens. It's equivalent to 17mm with the Nikon sensor, but that's still wonderfully wide. There's nothing comparable for any of the other D-SLRs out there except for a few professional cameras (the Canon 1Ds, the Kodak equivalent, etc.). In general, Nikon's line of DX lenses gives some amazing wide-angle options that make up for the smallness of the sensor. I don't believe that any of Nikon's competitors have anything like this on the wide-angle end of the scale.

- My only other Nikon lens right now is the 105mm macro. It's fantastic for shooting tiny things, but not very useful as a portrait or sports lens. I tried shooting some guys playing basketball outside, and it just can't accurately autofocus on a person standing
10-15 feet away. It kept getting distracted by the background. Even with closeups, you end up doing a lot of manual focusing.

- I'm pondering purchasing some kind of telephoto lens. I'm torn between the 80-200 (weighs less, costs less, but still pretty hefty), or the 70-200 (weighs and costs noticably more, but has nifty vibration reduction technology). I'm more likely to get the 10.5 fisheye before I'll get any kind of telephoto.

I've only put a small fraction of my D70 photos online. You can check out two parties that I've been two recently with my camera here and here.