The D700 Rocks!

I got my new Nikon D700 in this week and it is a major step up from my Nikon D200 - and that’s been a great camera.  I considered the D300 as well but went with the D700 and am glad I did.  The D700 is a full frame sensor where the D300 is not.  That means I get a wider angle with my lenses than on the DX line.  And while the D300 has great low-light performance, the D700 is off the charts.  I shot the D300 last week for a game and had the ISO at 3200 with low noise, but at 6400, the images got very blurry.  The D700 - I shot at 6400 with virtually no noise.  The usability rocks as well since many of the features I used can be assigned to buttons or quick-access menus.

But enough of the pontification - look at the images and see if you can see the difference.

The 1st is a shot from last night’s game using the D700.  The 2nd was taken 2 weeks ago (same stadium) with the D200.  Excluding for the white balance setting (which explains the different shades of green in the grass), there are a few key differences.  First, notice how much brighter and better exposed the D700 picture looks.  That’s due to me cranking the ISO up.  Next, notice the track and bottom of the stadium in the backgrounds.  You’ll see there is much more detail on the D700.  It’s almost a blur on the D200.  Next, look at the different tones on the black jerseys.  There are actually shuttle shades of black in the D700 picture.  Same holds true for the whites on the jersey.  With the D200, you just don’t get that range at night.  Look at the stadium seats and you’ll really see the difference.  But the real value is in the workflow and quality of pictures themselves.  I used to take 300 pictures per game to get 100 or so that I could work with.  It took me 90 minutes or so to process everything since I had to run the D200 images through noise reduction filters.  About 1/2 of my images were blurry due to the auto-focus speed and predictive tracking at night.  Now with the D700, my yield is about 80% so the ones I toss out are mostly due to poor composition.  I only put the 6400 pictures through an extra noise reduction step.  And I also shoot fewer pictures since my yield is so much better.  So…..I now spend about 30 minutes post game to do get the pictures processed, uploaded, and my blog entry written.  Combine that with better pictures and you can see why I love my D700!