Last month that changed with the launch of the Nikon D1, the first serious competitor for Kodak's Nikon and Canon-bodied series of pro digitals.

The D1 is impressively different from Kodak's efforts from the first moment of contact. Kodak must rely on Nikon and Canon to produce cameras, which it then buys and converts to digital. The D1 was designed from the beginning as a digital machine.

I am used to a digital being so heavy that it is difficult to shoot in low light. The D1 is compact and even lighter than the top-of-the-line Nikon film camera, the F5.

The main reason for this compactness and low weight is Nikon's choice of storage media, the CompactFlash card. Kodak's cameras use much larger PCMCIA cards. The capacity of PCMCIA cards is many times greater than CompactFlash, which maxes out at less than 200 megabytes, and PCMCIA cards can be about a fifth of the price.

However, many Kodak users are moving over from the cheaper and faster Type II hard drives to the much more durable Type I flash Ram cards, which are about the same price as CompactFlash.

I think I would be willing to deal with the higher price and lower capacity of CompactFlash cards to save myself a future filled with shoulder and back problems.

The D1 is easy to handle and the new TTL flash works well. Camera controls for changing various compression, file and custom settings are a bit cryptic.

Nikon also sent their new 17-35mm lens, which is a welcome addition for digital shooters. The D1's CCD is smaller than a frame of 35-millimetre film, which means lenses are effectively 50 per cent more powerful. The 17-35 is more like a 24-50mm lens and you need at least a 24mm lens to shoot in Hong Kong's tight spaces.

The bottom line is image quality. For some strange reason, Nikon refused to provide the software needed to download images directly from the D1. Our card reader was not compatible with the Nikon's cards, so I was able to shoot only one card's worth of images at one file compression setting, which were downloaded by Nikon. It was not a thorough introduction to the D1's abilities.

The Nikon's 7.5-megabyte images are big enough to run 8x10 inches in most newspapers and about 5x7 inches in most magazines.

Still, the quality did not bowl me over. They looked much more like very high- resolution point-and-shoot digital images than those I am used to from a pro-digital camera. The images were contrasty and often had blown-out highlights or shadows without detail.

The JPeg compression used in the default file format is not as clean as Kodak's compression format and photographers run the risk of adding much more noise to images if they re-JPeg files after colour correcting or resizing images.

While I did not see it, there have been reports of photographs having digital noise that cannot be corrected.

I predict that the bottom line will not be image quality, but the price, which at $60,000 is about half that of a Kodak.

The D1 is a good first effort, but it needs some polish, particularly on the software/firmware side. I fear that most photographers and wire agencies fail to see the dangers of a camera that stores images in JPeg format.

The D1 may mark a turning point for Nikon, helping it regain some of the huge market share it once had.

Hopefully, the introduction of the D1 will spur some serious competition in the pro-digital market which will benefit the consumers, no matter which brand they choose to shoot.

PROS AND CONS Product: Nikon D1 Price: $60,000 Pros: Light and easy to handle; new TTL flash works well Cons: CompactFlash weak on capacity; images contrasty, with blown-out highlights