In September, 2011, I bought a secondhand Nikon D2Xs with 40,000 shutter actuations on the clock and an exhausted battery. When new, this pro camera cost £3,500. I paid a shade less than a quarter of the original price and a new battery was over £100.

Much of the advice at the time was to buy a Nikon D300 in preference, as it was superior in almost every respect and the cost was broadly comparable. Long after, when a D300 had become quite cheap on the used market, I bought one - the ’s’ version - to test my original judgment in buying the D2Xs. I know now that I was right, and I know further that I will never part with the D2Xs.

This is not because of its advanced features. I use only a few of them, and even then not very often. It is because, despite its weight, it is the most comfortable and easy to use instrument. The Nikon D700 with a battery grip is bigger and unwieldy by comparison. The built-in grip of the D2Xs is much more accommodating than a separate screw-in accessory. There is a button for all the settings I frequently use and each button performs just one function. It is a very strong camera and you need not worry over breaking it. It provides screw drive for older AF lenses.

There is no built-in flash, but I disdain flash anyway. It is perfect at 100 ISO and a bit ragged when over 400 ISO. With this camera the use of fast lenses is repaid. If you ever worked with 35mm film cameras, you will probably agree that film beyond 400 ISO is unacceptably grainy. I can live with that limitation now, just as I did then.

The rubber seals fall off. Hardware store glue isn’t much good at fixing them back, but tearing them off and replacing them with gaffer tape works well enough. With a TC-16A teleconverter which was introduced with the first autofocus Nikons in the 1980s, and which is compatible with the D2Xs, you can get a new lease of life from AI manual focus Nikkor lenses. This is because the TC-16A provides critical automatic focus when you can’t trust your eyesight despite the camera’s bright viewfinder. Like all crop sensor digital cameras the field of view of your lenses is multiplied by 1.5, and the TC-16A multiplies by a further 1.6 with a loss of just over one stop of light. When using manual focus lenses the viewfinder helpfully indicates the direction in which you need to focus. Most Nikons just illuminate a single green light when focus is achieved.

The D2Xs is a photographer’s camera. There are no picture styles to help make nice portraits or impressive landscapes. It doesn’t connect to the internet unless you buy an accessory for that. At two and a half pounds it’s a heavyweight. The LCD on the back is only 2.5″. It’s a 12 Megapixel camera in an age when even the basic entry level camera from Nikon has twice that number. The D2Xs dates from 2006. By digital standards it is prehistoric. But it works for me and I would buy it again even today. The shutter count after 7 years is 70,000. I’ve sold the D300s.