A look at the Nikon D700

September 13, 2008 |

A look at the Nikon D700

By Shelton Muller

The sun is set and the remaining glimmer of daylight casts an inspiring glow across the cityscape. People move through the streets. Heading for your car you pause to wait for the bridal party. Turning back you notice the bride as she pauses in the incandescent glow of a street light. “What a beautiful image” you think to yourself, knowing the spontaneity of this image is almost impossible.

Now imagine a camera that could take this picture. Actually, no imagination is necessary. Welcome to the world of the Nikon D700.

At this point many people would say that any camera can take this picture. All you need to do is ramp up the ISO –and that’s true. We would only ask them ‘how well could it be done?’ At high ISO’s digital cameras produce images that are ‘noisy’ – coarse and grainy in appearance. Nuances of highlight and shadow disappear and colours shift and lose their brilliance. Not so with the new Nikon D700.

The Nikon D3 and D700 are Nikon’s manifest commitment to photographers who want what they have always expected from Nikon – quality cameras that produce incredible quality images. But maybe we never expected this. The quality of image these cameras produce has astounded the photographic community worldwide. Images taken at high ISO ratings – 1600, 3200, 6400 – bearing beautiful highlight and shadow details, retaining brilliant colour and revealing little if any noise – are made possible by the unique EXPEED technology surrounding the Nikon imaging system. Skin tones that are subtle, real and filled with nuance. Details in shadows and highlights that enable you to make beautiful prints from jpegs that come straight from the camera. Exposure, sharpness and white balance accuracy thatsaves you hours of post processing time. This is the reality of the Nikon D700.

The Nikon D700 features the same sensor as its big brother, the D3, and incorporates Nikon’s EXPEED technology, ensuring the images bear all the advantages we have mentioned. While not as heavy or as rugged as the D3, the D700 is a remarkably well built and weatherproof camera with an intuitive and functional design and easy menus. Unlike its bigger brother, the D700 also has a built in pop-up flash which acts as a commander unit for off-camera flash techniques using Nikon’s Creative Lighting System for flash photography. Also, it features a sensor cleaning function that will keep your images free from dust and save you hours of image repair in the post process.

But let’s not talk about the tech-specs right here. Let’s consider the possibilities. No longer will you need to concern yourself with the setting sun. You will simply continue to shoot in its afterglow. No longer will you find yourself wishing you could capture the street life that teases the photojournalist in you. You will simply roam the streets with your D700 in hand. No longer will you need to resort to using flash at your weddings when the light is still quite lovely. You’ll simply raise your camera to your eye and capture the images as you see them. And no longer will you manufacture your images to achieve the subtleties of skin tones and the details in highlights and shadows you desire. You will simply open your jpegs and send them off to print.

Those are the very real possibilities that owners of the Nikon D700 will soon realise. Nikon have not only given us a new technology, they have changed the way we will take photographs from this point forward. They have made possible the kinds of images we used to dream of.