Greetings from Italy. News travels fast, and thanks to a tip from a friend, I got word of the newly announced Nikon D3 early this morning.
With specifications of ISO 200 to 6400 in the base range, extendable to ISO 100 and 25600 on either end, Nikon’s new flagship looks very impressive for those interested in low-light performance. Has Nikon announced the ultimate rig for concert photography?
Raising the bar, quite literally, the D3’s HI-1 and HI-2 settings of ISO 12800 and 25600 sound like a gift from heaven for concert photographers. A full two stops above the previous limit of ISO 6400 introduced with the high settings of Canon’s recent offerings, I’ll be very curious to see if, miraculously, Nikon can deliver in this regard.
As Nikon has seemingly always been a distant second or third in the high ISO department, lagging behind both Canon and Fuji, the D3’s specs are shocking to say the least. If Nikon can truly deliver in image quality and at least match that from the competition, this in itself would be a major feat. If the D3 can leapfrog the competition, I think many people will be shocked, as it would bring Nikon from lagger to leader in a single generation.
Monster ISO range aside, the most notable feature is the “full-frame” sensor, which features the familiar dimensions of 35mm film. At 36mm x 23.9mm, Nikon is calling this format FX, in line with its previous stable of APS-C DX sensors that feature a 1.5x crop factor over conventional 35mm.
The larger sensor, and correspondingly larger photosites, modest 12mp resolution, and slew of other features, the D3 looks great on paper.
In its parade of announcements, Nikon also rolled out the successor to the D200, a 12mp DX-format D300, which features similar specifications as the D3 in a smaller form factor and of course with a smaller sensor, keeping the DX-format alive and well. In addition, Nikon has announced five new lenses, the most interesting for the masses are two f/2.8 zoom lenses. First, a new ultra-wide 14-24mm lens, and also a new standard zoom at 24-70mm. Tasty.
5 Comments Add your own
1. Anand Sankaran | August 23rd, 2007 at 7:59 am
And speed. Looks like it. Man you are going to be poor-er.
2. Stephen | August 23rd, 2007 at 9:22 am
The specs are certainly very impressive and exciting. No doubt there’ll be some controversy but I hope Nikon lives up to its proud reputation of delivering amazing cameras…
Did you see the article about Nikon’s patent for the full colour RGB sensor?
Anand is right, you are going to be poorer but I think it may just be worth it! :-)
3. Todd | August 24th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Anand: Ha, definitely. At least the camera is not yet released, so my funds have a few months to regenerate. Add to that a few months to let Nikon work out the kinks of production and bugs, and perhaps next Spring I’ll be in the market to buy.
Stephen: Yes, if Nikon can actually deliver on this, I think it will be quite a feat. Clean ISO 6400 sounds great to me, let alone going to 12800 or 25600. We’ll just have to wait and see!
4. Chris | August 24th, 2007 at 7:41 am
From what Bjorn and a few others who went to Japan for the release and saw the sample images are saying the ISO6,400 is at least a good as the Canon 1D3.
I’m fairly sure that for Todd and myself, this means that ISO25,600 will be acceptable as well.
As a brand new owner of a Canon 1D3, the ISO6,400 cleans up amazingly well after noise ninja. I was shocked to see that there is very little loss of detail running noise ninja at its image profiling defaults. What is even more surprising is that after all the chroma reduction, on a few images I’ve tested, there is barely any loss of color saturation.
The D3 (and D300) look absolutely stunning. Who can complain with a pixel pitch of 8.43?
The paper specs certainly imply wonderful image quality and, at the very least, high-iso performance unheard of on a Nikon body.
5. Chris | August 24th, 2007 at 7:43 am
I’d also like to add that I’m glad that I didn’t buy any more DX lenses. The new AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8 looks sweet.
speak up
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>