Nikon D3 ISO 3200 Samples - Leaked!

Who’s the photographer? I want to shake his (her) hand!

By the way, the photographer with the Canon 1D Mark II / III cameras strapped around his neck happens to be on Gerard McGovern’s team.

The fact that the first ever full-sized images to come from a new Nikon digital SLR are high ISO samples shows how much pent up demand there is for a high-performance, high-ISO workhorse camera from Nikon.

Anyway, go get an eyeful of two, full-sized originals from a pre-production (Ver.0.25 appears in the Software field of the EXIF data). The 6.3 MB files were first found here.

If for any reason the download link above doesn’t work, I’ve mirrored them on my Pbase account:
_EF22344.JPG | _EF22348.JPG

The appearance of an underscore prefix in the filename means that the images were shot in Adobe RGB colorspace. If you have Photoshop and it’s set in a non-Adobe colorspace, you’ll get a message warning you that the file you’re opening was shot in Adobe RGB when you open the JPGs.

I’ve created two screen captures of EXIF for both files as seen in Nikon Viewer:
_EF22344.JPG | _EF22348.JPG

From the EXIF data, you’ll see that the lens used is the new Nikkor AF-S 400mm f/2.8G ED VR, Nikon’s latest super telephoto lens, announced on 23-August-2007 along with two other super telephoto zooms.

For a more complete set of EXIF data, read the post by Julia Borg that has links to the EXIF dump.

Additionally, D200_4me proves that it’s a cinch to apply effective sharpening and noise reduction to these photos in Nikon Capture NX.

Reactions to these photos

Here are a couple of examples:

• Nikon D2Xs at ISO 800 vs Nikon D3 at ISO 3200
• The Nikon folks are pretty excited
• Canon folks downplay the quality of these shots. Joseph Papa posts ISO 3200 and ISO 6400 samples from the Canon EOS 1D Mark III, with and without NR (noise reduction) as there is some speculation that Nikon implements some sort of chroma / color NR in-camera - thanks, Joseph - the 1D3 files look great too.
• In another related Canon thread, I posted a link to an EOS 1D Mark III ISO 3200 portrait taken under artificial lighting.
• Kabe Luna is impressed by the samples, and also lists D3 features that are attractive to him relative to the EOS 5D.

I’m quite willing to bet that it’s been a while since you’ve seen such strong reactions to Nikon photos.

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Tags: Nikon 400mm f/2.8G