THE NIKON D3 IS WITHOUT A DOUBT THE CAMERA OF THE MOMENT.

Nikon's flagship is a major step in the right direction and will surely satisfy the company's most demanding customers.

It is an expensive beast, make no mistake, but it is a top of the range camera aimed at the professional market.

From the moment you pick up the body, it oozes class. The reassuring weight is very well balanced and rest comfortably in your hands.

The layout and menu is classic Nikon and very little has changed since the days of the D2x. The LCD screen on the back of the camera has been made larger though and is a full 3inches across. The camera also has the new Live View feature as seen on the cheaper D300.

The D300 will indeed be the D3's biggest competitor. At less than half the price it also packs 12 megapixels, albeit on a slightly smaller sensor.

The D3 is, in fact the first Nikon with a full 35mm sized CCD/CMOS. Having a larger sensor means that lenses perform at their traditional focal length. The image is not magnified as it is on smaller sensors, so the angle of view is slightly wider. This means that the photographer will have less need for ultra wide fish-eye lenses. Larger sensors also produce less depth of field for a given focal length making it easier to make a distracting background disappear out of focus.

Then there is the frame rate. Starting at a respectable 8 frames a second using the full resolution and moving up to a blistering 11 fps with a cropped image, this camera leaves everything else dead in its wake.

This does mean that you will destroy memory cards in seconds, but luckily the camera loads 2 seperate compact flash cards. These can be used either consecutively with the second starting to write when the first is full, or as backup, with both writing the same data at the same time.

Using the D3's high ISO setting in low light

Where the D3 really blows everyone else out of the water, is in its performance in low light.

The camera's predesessors suffered serious noise issues when taken out after dark, but this is now a thing of the past.

At low ISO settings the camera displays no noise at all. At about 1600 traces start to appear, but this is still at an acceptable level until you reach 6400. When you turn the heat up to 25600 (yes, you read that right) the noise is getting serious, but of course, by now you are shooting in pitch black, brining back pictures of a black cat in a coal mine. In fact, if Lewis Hine had this camera, he would not have bothered taking pictures of miner children above ground, he would have shot them while working in the tunnels underground.

Seriously, the low noise levels combined with high ISO capability of the camera is likely to revolutionize how we think of low light photography. If camera manufacturers can keep this up and develop further in this direction we may even get to a point where photographers won’t instinctively reach for a flash when the sun goes down, and use the flashgun as a creative tool rather than a practical necessity.

Final Verdict

The Nikon D3 is a good ’un. It is a serious camera for serious photographers and blows the competition out of the water in more ways than one.

Some great developments have been made over the D2X, and it is good to see Nikon moving away from the frankly artificial split between the high-speed D2Hs and the high-res D2X. There were just too many photographers that needed the functionality of both.

The price tag is hefty, but it is intended for people who earn their living form lenses, so that should not be a problem

Overall, if you have the money, you won’t be sorry. This is a serious piece of kit and stands head and shoulders above the rest in some departments.

But…

And this is a big BUT. There is an elephant in the room and it comes in the form of a 21 megapixel Canon D1 Mark III.

The Nikon D3 is a great camera, but the wisdom of Nikon’s decision not to have a megapixel monster like the Canon surely has to be questioned.

Sure, not every professional has a need to blow their pictures up billboard size, but for those that do, there is currently only one SLR on the market, and it is not a Nikon.

The company may come to rue this mistake…

Specifications