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A review of the Nikon D700 by a Nikon D300 owner,
I am making this review of the Nikon D700 from the perspective of someone who also owns a Nikon D300.
Without qualification, the Nikon D300 is a superb camera. So many superlatives have been used with the D300 that I will not repeat them here. All the superlatives used with the D300 applies equally well to the D700. I will add however that as good as the superlatives may have been with the D300, the D700 deserves a bit more.
Let me explain.
The Nikon D700 is equipped with a full frame FX sensor (36.00mm x 23.90mm). This is the same sensor used by the Nikon D3. Nikon D3 12.1MP FX Digital SLR Camera (Body Only) The D300 on the other hand uses the APS-C sensor (23.60mm x 15.80mm). Both the D700 and the D300 have about the same 12 megapixel rating (with the D300 actually slightly higher).
The D700 having a bigger sensor than the D300 but with about the same megapixel rating means that the size/pixel density of the D700 is much lower than the D300. The ratio is 1.4MP/cm2 vs 3.3MP/cm2 for the D700 and the D300 respectively. A lower ratio means lower noise and this ratio favors the D700. For the D700, this translates to lower noise in capturing the same image than when using using the D300.
The D700 lower noise level in turn translates to the D700 being able to operate at a higher ISO level than the D300. The D700 can operate as high as ISO 25,600 while the D300 can go up to ISO 6,400. It is of course quite rare to shoot at such high ISO as it will always be better to shot at a lower ISO rating. But if both the D700 and D300 were shooting at the same ISO, the D700 will have lower noise levels. Simply put, the higher ISO capability of the D700 versus the D300 indicates the higher level of performance of the D700’s sensor vs the D300.
My actual use validates this theoretical advantage. I noticed that while the noise level of the D300 is very good at ISO 1600 and even 3200, the D700 consistently showed lower noise level than the D300 shooting at the same ISO setting and light condition. This is most noticeable when shooting at night with many bright lights in the periphery of the main subject.
In terms of color rendition, I have not noticed any significant differences between the D300 and the D700 in the limited time that I have been using the D700. It may be due to the fact that I have conducted my test at dusk and at night.
When using the D700, the full frame sensor means that one will not need to convert the focal length of the lens by a factor of 1.5x. So a 50mm lens will be a 50mm lens for the D700 rather than its 75mm equivalent when used with the D300.
While this may appear to be a disadvantage on the telephoto side, its gain on the wide angle side is considerable and can only be described as an eye opener. The D700 advantage in wide angle application does not just come from its wider perspective. Rather, it is how the D700 maximizes and makes full use of such excellent lens as the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 that makes buying the D700 such an eye opener.
The resulting images taken with the Nikon D700 and the Nikon 14-24mm are clearer, sharper and crisper compared to the D300 even when the focal length in the D700 is zoomed out to its equivalent in the the D300 (21mm in D700 and 14mm in D300). Vignetting is not noticeably worse even when the D700 is used with the 14-24mm glass fully open at its widest focal length (14mm, f/2.8). This is surprising considering that the D700 is now using the full lens instead of just its sweet spot in the center (which would have been to the advantage of the D300 due to its APS-C sensor).
It is not just the wide angle lens that benefited from the D700. Even the slight vignetting I noticed with my 85mm f/1.4 shot with the D300 at f/2.8 is not considerably worse in the D700. I am very surprised at this rather unexpected results as I had expected the opposite. At any rate, vignetting is easily corrected in post-processing.
Still, I should add that for corner to corner sharpness (such as in landscape photography), the D700 with its full-frame sensors will be more demanding on the lens than the D300 with its smaller APS-C sensor.
As to the physical differences between the D700 and the D300, while these two models are roughly equal in size, the D700 is slightly heavier than the D300. This is not an issue for me at all.
What tilts the balance in favor of the D700 is its view finder which is significantly brighter and better than the D300. This difference is very noticeable when switching from the D700 to the D300 and vice versa.
This much improved viewfinder however is a mixed blessing. One disadvantage that the D700 has over the D300 is that the D700…
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|A Smaller D3,
This is an amazing camera. I am not going to go over the specs because you can read about them on just about any camera web site. What I am going to concentrate on is who should buy one and why.
First off, I’ve read about many folks lamenting having bought the D300 and now feel like the need to “upgrade” to a D700. These are two different cameras for two different purposes and as such don’t compete against each other so much as complement each other. The D300 doesn’t have the low noise capability (The D700 can get clean images at ISO1600 vice ISO400 for the D300) nor does it have the wide angle capabilities of the D700. The D700 doesn’t have the 1.5x multiplier of the D300 so wide angle lenses are truly wide. Additionally, while you can use DX lenses on the D700, you will only be using 5 mp of your sensor.
Another comparison is between the D3 and D700. They both have the same sensor so the image and ISO abilities are the same. The D700 comes slower out of the box but with the Nikon EN-EL4a Rechargeable Li-Ion Battery for MB-D10 Battery Pack and Nikon D2 and D3 Digital SLR Cameras, Nikon MB-D10 Multi Power Battery Pack for Nikon D300 & D700 Digital SLR Cameras, Nikon BL-3 Battery Chamber Cover for Nikon EN-EL4 and EN-EL4a for the MB-D10, and Nikon MH-21 Quick Charger for Nikon EN-EL4 and EN-EL4a Rechargeable Li-Ion Batteries (~$500) you will be rocking with 8 fps and great battery life; just barely slower than the D3. Also, I have not found any technical data on the autofocus and processing chip but in my non-scientific side by side comparison the D700 seemed just as fast as the D3 while the D300 appeared noticeably slower. (This was shot with the 85mm 1.4D. This lens does not have Silent Wave Motor focus and therefore relies on the camera’s focusing motor.) As I said this is not scientific but I am also guessing that Nikon saved on engineering costs by just transferring the guts of the D3 to the D700 and slowing it down (this is probably the reason the D700 gets such poor battery life (200-300 shots vice 1000 shots) in comparison to the D300).
So without further ado:
Buy the Nikon D700 12.1MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only) if:
You need to shoot in no flash low light situations. With a 1.4 lens at 1600 ISO you would be amazed at the quality of the photos! If you are not doing close up work of people you can get great shots @ 6400 ISO. If you can stand a grain in B+W(a very cool effect by the way), then you can get good shots @ 25,600!
You want to shoot ultra wide. With no multiplication factor, you can shoot truly wide angle photos. The 14mm is 14mm not 21mm like on a DX camera. Also, although you can get the Nikon 12-24mm f/4G ED IF Autofocus DX Nikkor Zoom Lens which will be the equivalent of 18-36mm, it will still have the distortion of a 12-24mm lens. So compared to the FX D700 you would get 14 deg less width with more distortion.
You are willing to spend $4500 more on the lenses. The body is disposable, the lenses are what last. You could get away with a 50mm 1.4 and that would be a fine place to start and a great way to learn how to frame a picture. However, I would recommend the following 3 lenses and I would recommend getting them in the following order. 1) The Nikon 85mm f/1.4D AF Nikkor Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras – $1000 (Super fast, incredibly shallow depth of field, and amazing construction. Get this lens and practice getting good with a fixed length lens! Get this lens over the 85mm 1.8 for the construction and 9 blade design. You will be blown away with how low the light can be and you can still get the shot! (Rumors have it that Nikon is about to replace this lens with a new improved version. I expect the new lens will be better but will likely cost 1.5 to 2x as much.) 2) The Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras – $1700 This is the lens pros use to earn their living. (It has been 5 years since Nikon updated this lens so it is due…
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|Great Camera — A perspective from a D300/700 Owner,
This is very simple, if you are a Nikon shooter looking for a new camera then stop reading and buy this camera. It’s that good.
Handling
This camera is brilliant to hold and use. Nikon has done it again and has made the user interface more usable and streamlined. What to change flash modes. Press the flash pop-up button and rotate the control wheel. Sweet. Want to change create and use a User defined mode? There are two. Set your mode up. Go to the menu and save it. To use it rotate the shooting mode dial to U1 or U2. Presto you are there. In the D300 and D700 you to have to setup things in the menu and switch in the menu. Also, there were 2 sets of things you could change and they were not all inclusive. It was all horribly confusing and I never used it. Speaking of shooting modes. There is now one position on the shooting mode dial for scene mode shooting. You change through the different scene modes with the control wheel and the type scene shows up on the back screen. Sweet. I can go on and on but needless to say Nikon have really improved their interface. One caveat, I don’t think it is quite up to par with the GH1 to change exposure compensation (IMO the most important control) but still a huge step in the correct direction in handling. I like the handling of the D7000 better than either the D700/300.
Low Light Shooting
The D300 wasn’t that great for Hi ISO. It shoots clean at 400 ISO and usable up to 1600. (The D90 and D300s were better) The D700 was fantastic. Clean at 1600 ISO and usable up to 6400. It opened up new worlds. The D7000 is close to the equal of the D700. Enough said. Just to give you an example. The bouquet toss at a reception is often done in poor light. By using 1600 instead of 400 you get the equivalent of 4 times more light. At ISO400 you flash may need to use 1/4 power and you can get 1 maybe 2 shots of the toss and catch before the flash needs to recharge. At ISO1600 your flash would only need to use 1/16th power and now you can get 5-6 shots. This is huge.
Picture Quality
Like all modern DSLRs it takes great pictures. I don’t pixel peep so I can’t really say that I notice a difference between the pictures from the D7000 and any of my 12mp cameras. It makes really nice pictures and that is all I care about.
Useful Photography Features (Not Marketing Features)
–100% view finder! Big bright with 100% coverage. No more guessing of your framing. (It is not as bright as the D700. However, it is 100% vice 95%)
–2 SD slots – When your getting paid to shoot a wedding or any gig, my card broke is not an excuse. Very useful feature. For the home user put two smaller cards rather than one big card and save some money.
–Smaller and lighter than D300, D700, D3s, D3x- When you stand on your feet for 9 hours shooting the wedding and reception, you start to feel every ounce you are carrying. Often you will be carrying two bodies with a fast tele zoom and fast wide zoom. That starts to get heavy. Light weight here we come.
–2016-Segment RGB Meter- for spot on exposure and white balance–No one touches Nikon on this and this one is fantastic.
–1/8000th — Very useful for shooting into the sun wide open with a bright lens
–1/250 — Could be better (1/500th for D40) but could be much worse. Auto FP helps.
–Magnesium body and better sealing — Shoot in dusty environments without messing up the inside your camera.
–Uses the ML-L3 infra red remote — Small and cheap. IR sensor on the front and back of the camera.
–Autofocus focus motor for non-AF-S lenses
Marketing Features that will sometimes be Useful
–16Mp — Nikon was obviously getting creamed in the marketing wars on this. This is going to lead to bigger files requiring larger hard drives and faster computers. Occasionally it will be useful if you can’t frame as close as you would like and you need to crop or you need to print big. Alien Skin Blow Up 2, Image Resizing Plug-in Software for Photoshop, Macintosh & Windows and Genuine Fractals 6 Professional Edition 1-user Full are two very nice programs that can increase the size of your photos for printing large. 16 MP is nice by not necessary.
–39 Point Auto Focus — To me in some ways this is better than the 51 point of the D300 and D700 as that gets too unwieldy. However, you really don’t even need 39. However, still useful on occasion.
–6 frames per second– I very rarely ever put my camera in 3 frames per second. When I do so it fills the card quickly. If you are shooting the big game then 6 is nice. Or it is nice for some cool special effects shots. Other than that you won’t really find yourself using it that much.
Video
The other thing I am not really going to dwell on is the video capabilities. In my opinion all the various video options are mostly marketing hype really targeted at a niche market. Shallow…
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|Cool things you might not know the D7000 can do,
Just take it for granted that this takes amazing pictures under all conditions, including low light, and that it contains all the manual controls that you’d ever want.
Instead, here’s some things that the camera does that you might not have heard about:
* Built-in EyeFi support
If you’ve used EyeFi SD cards before, you probably assumed that it would work with the D7000, since the D7000 now uses SD cards instead of CF. But not only do you not have to mess around with SD-to-CF adapters, the camera is actually EyeFi aware– you can choose to have it upload or not upload on a slot-by-slot basis (so you might have it automatically upload the RAW files you saved to an EyeFi Pro card in slot 1, but not bother to upload the JPEGs you saved to the EyeFi Explorer card in slot 2), and there is also an icon that appears on the Info display to indicate that there are files waiting to upload, that the upload is in progress or disabled, etc.
The Nikon Wifi adapter is going for $400. A 4GB, class 6 EyeFi card goes for $40. If you really want to move RAW files, snag the Pro version for $80. Yes, the Nikon adapter does things that EyeFi can’t, but if you just want to get your files onto a PC without pulling the card, why spend 10X the money?
You’re stuck with the usual limitations of the EyeFi card, but I fully expect to use this feature a LOT with studio portraits– yeah, it only takes 10 seconds to pull the card and have Windows recognize that you added it, then another 5 seconds to eject the card and stick it back in the camera. But if you just want a quick check that your exposure or focus is where you want it, wouldn’t you rather just hit a single key and see your last shot, then get right back into the flow? You may want to drop your JPEG file sizes to speed up the transfer.
* In-camera RAW file processing
The camera contains a ton of built-in settings– in addition to the basics like Standard, Normal, Landscape, etc, you also get all the various Scene modes, which are basically variations on those main settings.
RAW processing allows you to see how the shot would have looked had you used one of those other modes. In other words, you shoot in Normal, which basically applies no processing to the image, then select the RAW file, and choose how you’d like to adjust it. You can change the white balance settings, exposure, basic picture setting (landscape, portrait, etc), noise reduction, color space, and dynamic lighting. With the exception of the advanced details on the basic picture settings, you see a preview of how your change will affect the picture.
If you like it, just hit EXEcute and it writes out a JPEG to your card. Don’t like it, just back out and nothing’s saved.
This means that you don’t have to worry that shooting in Vivid is going to result in an oversaturated image, or you can punch something up even more after the fact. The only real drawback here to me is that it is going to kick out a JPEG, so if you’re planning on doing further editing in Photoshop, this may not be the best route. But if you’re just looking to go right from the camera to the web, or want to get an idea of how playing with custom settings will affect your shots, this is a massive shortcut to taking and then deleting a ton of shots. (And keep in mind that Photoshop will allow you to mess with most of these settings when importing RAW files anyway, and the plugin D7000-compatible RAW plugin had a release candidate posted yesterday, so you can finally open your RAW shots.)
And a related feature that’s in most other Nikons, but that you might not know about– you can define your own basic picture settings. Want something that’s super-saturated and super-contrasty? Just hit a few buttons, choose a name, and you’re done. On the older Nikons, you had to edit the basic profile itself, now, you can use one as a starting point and adjust from there. Much cleaner.
* User-defined settings on the control knob
Not as hidden as the first two, but I can’t emphasize how cool this feature is. Here’s the situation I was in last night– I was shooting a singing contest in a dimly-lit venue. I was allowed to use a flash, but I didn’t want to constantly be blasting the singers while they were performing.
I defined one setting as shutter priority, 1/60th, ISO Hi 2, center-weighted metering & focus, no flash. The second setting was automatic, ISO auto, full metering and autofocus, flash enabled. I’d take a couple shots in U2 with the flash, close the flash down and switch to U1 and shoot a half a dozen shots, then switch back to U2 and use the flash for a couple more shots. There was no fumbling for controls, no worrying that I changed the shutter speed without realizing it when changing between Auto and S– every time I went from U2 to U1, all my settings were reset to where I put them before the event…
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|Great Camera — A perspective from a D300/700 Owner,
This is very simple, if you are a Nikon shooter looking for a new camera then stop reading and buy this camera. It’s that good.
Handling
This camera is brilliant to hold and use. Nikon has done it again and has made the user interface more usable and streamlined. What to change flash modes. Press the flash pop-up button and rotate the control wheel. Sweet. Want to change create and use a User defined mode? There are two. Set your mode up. Go to the menu and save it. To use it rotate the shooting mode dial to U1 or U2. Presto you are there. In the D300 and D700 you to have to setup things in the menu and switch in the menu. Also, there were 2 sets of things you could change and they were not all inclusive. It was all horribly confusing and I never used it. Speaking of shooting modes. There is now one position on the shooting mode dial for scene mode shooting. You change through the different scene modes with the control wheel and the type scene shows up on the back screen. Sweet. I can go on and on but needless to say Nikon have really improved their interface. One caveat, I don’t think it is quite up to par with the GH1 to change exposure compensation (IMO the most important control) but still a huge step in the correct direction in handling. I like the handling of the D7000 better than either the D700/300.
Low Light Shooting
The D300 wasn’t that great for Hi ISO. It shoots clean at 400 ISO and usable up to 1600. (The D90 and D300s were better) The D700 was fantastic. Clean at 1600 ISO and usable up to 6400. It opened up new worlds. The D7000 is close to the equal of the D700. Enough said. Just to give you an example. The bouquet toss at a reception is often done in poor light. By using 1600 instead of 400 you get the equivalent of 4 times more light. At ISO400 you flash may need to use 1/4 power and you can get 1 maybe 2 shots of the toss and catch before the flash needs to recharge. At ISO1600 your flash would only need to use 1/16th power and now you can get 5-6 shots. This is huge.
Picture Quality
Like all modern DSLRs it takes great pictures. I don’t pixel peep so I can’t really say that I notice a difference between the pictures from the D7000 and any of my 12mp cameras. It makes really nice pictures and that is all I care about.
Useful Photography Features (Not Marketing Features)
–100% view finder! Big bright with 100% coverage. No more guessing of your framing. (It is not as bright as the D700. However, it is 100% vice 95%)
–2 SD slots – When your getting paid to shoot a wedding or any gig, my card broke is not an excuse. Very useful feature. For the home user put two smaller cards rather than one big card and save some money.
–Smaller and lighter than D300, D700, D3s, D3x- When you stand on your feet for 9 hours shooting the wedding and reception, you start to feel every ounce you are carrying. Often you will be carrying two bodies with a fast tele zoom and fast wide zoom. That starts to get heavy. Light weight here we come.
–2016-Segment RGB Meter- for spot on exposure and white balance–No one touches Nikon on this and this one is fantastic.
–1/8000th — Very useful for shooting into the sun wide open with a bright lens
–1/250 — Could be better (1/500th for D40) but could be much worse. Auto FP helps.
–Magnesium body and better sealing — Shoot in dusty environments without messing up the inside your camera.
–Uses the ML-L3 infra red remote — Small and cheap. IR sensor on the front and back of the camera.
–Autofocus focus motor for non-AF-S lenses
Marketing Features that will sometimes be Useful
–16Mp — Nikon was obviously getting creamed in the marketing wars on this. This is going to lead to bigger files requiring larger hard drives and faster computers. Occasionally it will be useful if you can’t frame as close as you would like and you need to crop or you need to print big. Alien Skin Blow Up 2, Image Resizing Plug-in Software for Photoshop, Macintosh & Windows and Genuine Fractals 6 Professional Edition 1-user Full are two very nice programs that can increase the size of your photos for printing large. 16 MP is nice by not necessary.
–39 Point Auto Focus — To me in some ways this is better than the 51 point of the D300 and D700 as that gets too unwieldy. However, you really don’t even need 39. However, still useful on occasion.
–6 frames per second– I very rarely ever put my camera in 3 frames per second. When I do so it fills the card quickly. If you are shooting the big game then 6 is nice. Or it is nice for some cool special effects shots. Other than that you won’t really find yourself using it that much.
Video
The other thing I am not really going to dwell on is the video capabilities. In my opinion all the various video options are mostly marketing hype really targeted at a niche market. Shallow…
Read more
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|