Nikon D3 Hands-On
As most of my regular readers know, I’m a Canon man. Not because they might be the best (which they aren’t) but that’s how it happened. My first digital camera was a Canon P&S with no manual controls, a PowerShot A20. Having liked that camera, my next model was a more advanced one with full manual controls and a ton of other improvements, namely the PowerShot A75. Then I jumped straight to my first DSLR, the Canon 300D or Digital Rebel. Less than 3 years later I upgraded to my current camera, the Canon 30D. In the meantime I have also invested a ton of money on quality lenses for my Canon system. As a result, I have become a Canon man.
Which is a shame, really. At this very moment I would jump ship to Nikon’s team and wouldn’t look back for one second. I’ve always maintained a healthy respect for Nikon even though they seemed a bit lagging behind Canon with their digital SLRs. Not anymore. With the D300 and especially the D3, Nikon have proved that they still got the moves and that they can really rock the boat if given the chance. I suspect Canon may be shaking in their boots just a little, especially after reviews of the D300 and D3 have started popping out on the web. Nothing like a bit of real competition to spice things up.
To cut these ruminations short, I was simply blown away by Nikon’s professional flagship camera, the D3. Funny enough, the brand new D3 belongs to a friend of mine from work who actually switched systems, from Canon to Nikon. He was using a Canon 5D with several professional L-series lenses and after he read a bunch of reviews on the Nikon D3, decided to switch brands.
A radical move you say? Perhaps, but I am really excited for him and almost in awe that he had the… ahem… balls… to make this move. And I’m positive he won’t regret it one bit.
So I had the opportunity to play with the D3 for a couple hours. What can I say… I don’t even know where to start.
I will say a few words about the lens first. My friend has purchased an excellent Nikkor 35-70mm f/2.8 D zoom. They quality of the build is incredible. I never thought that Nikon made such solid lenses. There didn’t seem to be any difference between this and a Leica or Zeiss lens. The smooth zooming mechanism is of the push-pull type and there’s also a handy “macro” feature at 35mm. Two things that bothered me a little are: AF slightly noisy and it doesn’t have a distance scale. In any case, this lens is a very good match for the D3. Both are built like the – pardon my French – proverbial brick shithouse.
Moving on to the D3 itself, the first impression I got was: “Damn this is heavy!”. It’s simply the heaviest camera body I’ve laid hands on and it really is slightly heavier than even the Canon 1Ds MkIII. Weight aside, this camera really is tank-like. I can’t recall many objects feeling as solid. Both vertical and horizontal grips have great ergonomics and in my short time with the camera it wasn’t hard for me to figure out all the main functions even though I hadn’t used a Nikon before.
The controls on the D3 are totally different from those used on my Canon 30D but nonetheless they are so well thought out and intuitive that it took me no time to figure them out, even without a user’s manual. Even the scroll wheel from the Canon isn’t hard missed, as the D3 makes up for it with its outstanding ergonomics.
Another amazing feature of the Nikon D3 is, of course, the beautiful LCD screen. Sporting almost 1 million pixels in resolution and 3 inches in diagonal, it trumps Canon’s best offerings. Checking the focus on a Canon LCD is a joke, even at 10x magnification but for the first time in a digital camera, the photographer can really stake a claim at being able to correctly judge focus in an image.
The 2 CF card slots are a stroke of genius. There are so many combinations in which the can be used, it’s almost intimidating. Professional photographers especially will be all over this feature. I’m sure Canon will copy it in their next professional models. Even the CF door mechanism is brilliantly thought out.
Though I can’t really tell if there’s a difference between the size of the D3’s and the 5D’s viewfinder, it is certainly humongous and the 51 focus points are almost overwhelming until you get used to them. I really like that they light up only when active, otherwise you can’t see them since they’re not etched in glass.
What the Nikon D3 does lack, sadly, is any type of sensor cleaning mechanism. Oh well, I guess you can’t have ‘em all. Perhaps this feature will be present in the D3X.
I also tried out the LiveView mode for a few minutes but didn’t really “dig” it. Apparently focusing in LiveView isn’t as straightforward as the rest of the camera.
Finally moving on to image quality, I was really impressed by the Auto WB. It seems to be very accurate, especially considering that I was shooting under mixed interior lighting conditions: tungsten + fluorescent. Unfortunately, as you can see further in the samples I shot, it seems that the WB shifts depending on the ISO used. To be more precise, the shift seems to occur when moving into the HI ISO area, above ISO 6400.
I shot a series of images of the same subject at the following ISOs: 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, HI0.3 (ISO 8000 I assume), HI0.7 (ISO 10000 I assume), HI1 (ISO 12800) and HI2 (ISO 25600). I hand-held the camera for this test and I shot wide open at f/2.8 and 70mm for all samples. For these 2 reasons, the images may appear a bit soft but I wouldn’t worry too much about that. This wasn’t a scientific test by far and I was just interested in the amount of noise at the various ISO settings. One other thing that I must mention is that the HI ISO Noise Reduction setting was at Normal, i.e. there is a bit of NR going on and you can actually see it in the 100% crops. Other settings were the factory defaults for JPG and the JPGs themselves were set to lowest compression (largest filesize).
The Nikon D3 does have settings below ISO 200, down to ISO 100 in fact (LO0.3, LO0.7, LO1) but they are not generally recommended because they tend to lower contrast a bit.
Now on to the actual samples. Clicking on the 100% crops will show the whole image, scaled down to a reasonable web resolution of 1200 pixels. Be aware that these larger images have up to 200KB in size and might take a while to load.
Nikon D3 ISO 200 sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/8s
Nikon D3 ISO 400 sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/15s
Nikon D3 ISO 800 sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/30s
Nikon D3 ISO 1600 sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/60s
Nikon D3 ISO 3200 sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/125s
Nikon D3 ISO 6400 sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/250s
Nikon D3 ISO 8000 (HI0.3) sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/320s
Nikon D3 ISO 10000 (HI0.7) sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/400s
Nikon D3 ISO 12800 (HI1) sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/500s
Nikon D3 ISO 25600 (HI2) sample, 70mm, f/2.8, 1/1000s
From these samples here’s what I can determine:
- at web resolutions you can’t really tell that there’s noise in the image until about ISO 8000.
- up to ISO 1600 or so it shows similar noise to other DSLRs but it really outshines the rest of them beyond that.
- even at 100% there’s impressively little amount of noise, even at insanely high ISO values
- at ISO 10000 there’s less noise than my Canon 30D at ISO 3200
- ISO 25600 is perfectly usable!! For newspapers, web images and even prints you can definitely use it if the need arises.
- at ISO 25600 there is a fair amount of color noise but it is incredibly well kept in check, rendering the noise almost film-like.
- image sharpness doesn’t decrease as we rack up the ISO.
- starting at about ISO 10000 there’s a visible shift towards green. I have no idea why that happens. Actually I feel that this green shift coupled with the noise gives the image an almost cross-processed film look.
- the metering seems to be very consistent. As I increased ISO, the shutter speed increased by the exact proportional amount.
- the future looks very promising!
My final “test” was to shoot 2 frames: one with Active D-Lighting on, the other with it off. For the Active D-Lighting frame I set this to the highest setting, since there are 3 levels for it: low, medium and high. It was just as well because for the subject that I chose to shoot (my desk phone) the differences were very subtle. From what I can tell, Active D-Lighting tries to “stretch” the dynamic range of a photo such as to even out the exposure to some extent. It’s almost like it lowers contrast a bit but not quite. In retrospect, I realize that I didn’t choose a very good subject; I should have chosen a higher contrast scene.
Active D-Lighting OFF
Active D-Lighting ON
After this short encounter with the Nikon D3, I have to say that I’m more than just a little in love with this outstanding camera. Would I buy one? Not at this stage. Unless I would be making lots of money from photography, there wouldn’t be any point for me to buy it. It is simply too powerful for what I need. Luckily my friend who bought it doesn’t share the same philosophy. Should you buy one? If you need advice from me whether to buy it or not then probably you don’t need it but if you have the cash lying around, then hell yeah!
