Hi, Well, Samy's Camera in L.A. had the MB-15 in. It has a couple of quirks that are going to take some getting used to. It does have the command dial on it. It does have a shutter release on it. It has an AF-ON button. It has a lock button to disable both the command dial and the shutter release. It requires 6 batteries. It looks like an add on when attached to the F100. It has certain areas on the front and the back that have the rubberized coating. It has a notch for your middle finger to fit into while your index finger rests on the shutter release button. The command dial is positioned too far the the right, your thumb naturally rests way to the left of the command dial. This then requires that you reposition you thumb uncomfortably to the right in order to manipulate the dial. When you position your thumb for horizontal shooting, your thumb naturally rests just below the main command dial and you only have to move your thumb a little bit up to manupulate the command dial. With the verticle command dial's positioning you have to uncomfortably position your thumb to the right and you lose a lot of the stability necessary to hold the camera steady with your right hand if you change exposure and shoot rapidly. Now, what does the command dial command you ask? Well, if you use programmed exposure, shutter priority or manual exposure it changes the shutter speed. If you are using aperture priority it does nothing unless you change custom setting 12 to switch the operation of the main command and sub-command dials. Those of you using the F100 as a backup to your F5 are going to have problems with this because in the horizontal shooting mode your aperture is set with the sub-command dial on an F5 with no way to reverse them. If you switch to your F100 with custom setting 12 set, the sub-command dial will change the shutter speed, and you therefore have to make the mental note that the main command dial is now changing your aperture. If you leave custom setting 12 off, but set custom setting 13, then you are using easy exposure compensation and the verticle command dial will manipulate this while you use the horizontal sub-command dial to change the aperture. If you set both custom setting 12 and 13 then the vertical command dial changes aperture and the horizontal sub-command dial changes your exposure compensation. The MB-15 is fairly light, in fact it feels somewhat like it's going to snap off if you hold the camera with your right hand by the grip only. The camera definately feels left heavy (if there is such a phrase) and puts a lot of strain on your right thumb, therefore making it important that you support the camera with your left hand. The grip is also fairly wide along the bottom and fairly thin, it might be a problem if you have small hands. The AF-ON button is useless to me as I never use it. It will, however be handy for those of you who do use it. However, why couldn't Nikon have also put the AE-L/AF-L button on there as well. Especially if you use the custom setting that allows you to press and release the AE-L button to lock exposure allowing your already overworked fingers to manipulate something else while still retaining exposure lock. I guess they were following the same design as the F5 which also has the AF-ON button in the verticle portion of its grip. Well, there it is, my first impressions. It will cost you around $199.00US to get one of your own. Scott D. Burnside
