Nikon D700 Review

Nikon impressed us all with its D300 and D3 bodies, but many believed a combination of the two could yield something even more special. Now there's no need to wonder. By essentially squeezing the D3’s full frame and high ISO quality into the D300’s more portable and affordable form factor, Nikon’s done just that with the new D700.

As such it’s hard not to be impressed by the D700’s handling, performance and feature-set. After all, it inherits a powerful 51-point AF system, high resolution 3in VGA monitor with Live View and superb 1005-pixel metering system, along with an HDMI port for connection to HDTVs. All this along with exactly the same full-frame sensor as the flagship D3 has been squeezed into a dust and moisture resistant body that’s closer in size and weight to the semi-pro D300.

The image quality is excellent as you’d expect, matching the D3’s high sensitivity performance. Switch the D700 to its highest sensitivity and you’ll see noise speckles like any other camera, but you have to remind yourself this is now operating at a whopping 25600 ISO. Turn the D700 down to 1600 or even 3200 ISO – a point where most DSLRs are still delivering noisy or smeared images – and you’ll be greeted by remarkably clean and usable results. It really is an amazing experience to confidently shoot at such high ISOs knowing the result won’t be compromised.

In-camera JPEGs taken with the default settings can sometimes look a little soft, but this is easily corrected by applying a little additional sharpening. For the best results though, shoot in RAW with the 14-bit option. Even using Capture NX's default settings, the results are much crisper than in-camera JPEGs, without losing any of their very natural quality.

more : cameralabs