It was the fine grain developer. PanX developed in Microdol-X was nearly grainless particularly if was diluted, Used on Tri-X it reduced the grain significantly. Couldn’t push with it at all - that needed something like HC110.

If I remember correctly the chemistry was really slow.

The real raw data off the sensor is not viewable. The camera processor adjusts the exposure, uses the bad sensor table to delete unusable pixels, and performs lossless compression. The file has no white balance; that has to be applied later in the viewing or JPEG conversion.

At this point the camera creates a JPEG file from the DNG file. The file is. Created from the DNG file and from the exposure data.

Or you can download the DNG file into Lightroom and process it in a way that you think good. Then you can convert it to JPEG. The camera has minimal controls for the process. Lightroom has more. Photoshop still more for DNG to JPEG conversion. And yes the conversion process limits what can be done with the file afterwards - color space, white balance, and compression type/loss level - are all imbedded now. Quite a bit of complexity but everything has reasonable defaults that you can start with. Still there are parts of the conversion process that are “automatic” .

Then there is the Silverfast software. Basically a user unfriendly and unforgiving editor and conversion program. It allows complete control of the JPEG conversion process. It can also disassemble a JPEG - extracting it’s contents and allowing editing of it. But as I said, it’s difficult to use - really difficult.

I shoot in NEF (Nikon RAW) exclusivity. I’ll do NEF+JPG when I have to deliver results very quickly. I normally deliver JPEG unless something else was contracted for such as TIF or PSD. One of the reasons I like JPG is that it really can’t be edited - I think of it like a slide.

Lastly - I miss Kodachrome!

The micro-USB 2 port is fairly resistant to bending; the mini-USB 2 port (D200) is not that resistant to the bending of its pins. The USB 3 C port (D850) is the most resistant to bending as it has guides to insure the correct alignment of the plug and port.

All the static ram media types have some kind of pin in the socket. CF cards use straight pins - so they're the easiest to bend. XQD cards use a side connector pin - basically it's a pin connected at two ends that's bent to make contact with the card edge connectors, more difficult but still bendable. SD cards have a somewhat more robust side pin connector that is the most difficult to bend. But they're all bendable.

As to making the card socket more robust - the card standard for that type would have to be modified.

And I thought my Nikkor 300 2.8 was heavy.