More than 10 years ago I got a couple of classic cameras that I still use today. These cameras were reasonably priced for the stature they had, and were competitively priced compared to the digital cameras of the day.
These days the prices for all famous film cameras have shot up, while quite capable digital cameras have gone down in price (especially if you don't need the latest version). The classics stopped making sense. When I started doing photography again I still wanted to get used gear, but at much lower budgets. This lead me to trying soviet rangefinders, folding medium format cameras, and a Sony mavica floppy camera.
The next camera in that line is a Nikon D100. I picked this because it is one of the first DSLRs, it has a CCD sensor, and has some lens compatibility with the Nikon F3 I already have. It was also cheap enough for an experiment.
The D100 was the first in Nikon's professional line of DSLRs, after the flagship D1. It was introduced in February 2002 and discontinued in 2005.
The body has this DSLR blobbyness from the 2000-2010s. Earlier film cameras are thinner (but heavier) and later mirrorless cameras are thinner (and the same weight). It's still comfortable to hold and the ergonomics are good.
The electronics show their age. The 1.8 inch LCD screen is tiny compared to modern screens. It's perfectly fine for using the menu, but almost useless for reviewing photos. The button layout is fine, however you can also see what 20 years of development has improved. A nice thing is that the mode dial has positions to change important settings with the back wheel, like ISO, white balance and image quality. This is shown on the black and white LCD segment display on the top of the camera.
While the controls have aged well, the same can not be said of the storage system. The camera uses Compact Flash cards for storage. It accepts larger cards with a firmware upgrade, I didn't want to take a gamble and ordered two 1GB cards. Storage capacity is 102 raw images on a card, which I found workable.
The biggest issue I ran into is writing speed. The camera has a buffer for 4 raw images made in rapid succession, but then takes at least a minute to write these to the card. You can take another photo when it has written one of these to the card, however it means that you're constantly fighting against that buffer. It's the biggest downside of the camera.
EDIT: So there is this setting to compress raw images. This was very useful when a 256MB card costs as much as a kidney, but these days it is not a factor. I set it to uncompressed and suddenly the time to store an image went from almost a minute to 15 seconds. Which is much more workable.
The sensor is a 6 megapixel APS-C sized CCD. The effective resolution is similar to what I can get out of 35mm color film. The colors in the raw images look nice, and I had to make only minor edits in lightroom to get them to my liking.
CCD sensors right before the switch to CMOS have been said to be more film like than modern cameras. I can certainly see why that comparison is made. My suspicion is however that it's mostly due to the lower resolution. Modern sensors can resolve quite a bit more detail and look sharper. Maybe too sharp.
The price was interesting. When the D100 was just announced it had a MSRP of $2000. With the whole film industry at full capacity you could get a film body and shoot / scanned quite a bit of slide film. I paid $90 for mine, which is three rolls of Ektachrome. Suddenly an obsolete DSLR with a bit of a film look starts to make sense again. I also added the 28mm F2.8 lens for $130. (which also works on my Nikon F3)
In conclusion, the D100 is a fine camera that can be had for a reasonable price. The ergonomics are good, the image quality rivals that of color film and overall I like using the camera. The only downside is the buffering. EDIT: Changing from compressed raw to normal raw fixed this.
When looking for a similar camera I would also consider the D200. It has a higher resolution and 3 years of improvements. Prices were not that different. It's not as retro as the D100 though.
EDIT2: I tagged all the photos I made and posted with https://cohost.org/mifune/tagged/Nikon%20D100
