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Fast Agile Beautiful - part 5 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2010

Nikon D700

A need to provide Patrick Ciatto with a camera to use at the Convention led to our receiving a D700 from Nikon and an offer of a lens of our choice. We agonised for a while and then went for the new 70-200mm f2.8 VR zoom, partly for its versatility and partly because we have received numerous questions about the lens from readers. Significantly the 70-200mm was the lens that won the Society Best Professional Lens of the Year Award.

And so we found ourselves in the new Liverpool 1 on a bright and crisp January morning, photographing the Liverpool Eye and some of the surrounding architecture of the Albert Dock. We then unleashed the Professional Imagemaker test puppies on the frozen beaches of the Irish Sea for some high-speed testing under very trying conditions. With temperatures around -5°C, a huge wind-chill, a mixture of snow, ice and frozen sea-water and a low sun it was a test of both humans and equipment - the dogs cared not a jot, having been confined to barracks by the snowy roads they exploded into action the instant they leapt from the car! The one thing we did note was a shortened battery charge, way short of the 'normal' temperature performance.

We have already commented in the D3S test that the D700 would be an ideal companion if a lighter or spare body were required. With a fullsized chip and a modest pixel count of 4,56x2,832 (12.1Mp) it delivers the same sparkling low-light performance as the D3 at the higher ISO ratings. This is a camera that may be used comfortably at 800 or 1600 ISO, with little compromise even if you push this out to 6400 ISO. Even then you a have a few 'Hi' settings to go to.

The D700 sports the majority of the features of the D3, losing out on framing rate, storage facilities and battery capacity. It is quite a bit smaller and lighter than a D3, a feature that would count highly with some photographers.

Colour Performance

As-shot with corrected exposure and white balance, the overall error on a Macbeth Chart was 3.84?E00. We corrected the calibration with ACR calibrator and reduced this error to 1.95?E00. This is the lowest value we have achieved with ACR-Calibrator. The high error was red at 3.78, the skin tone was middling at 1.76 and the low error was purple at 0.23. This result was obtained using the new 70-200mm f2.8 VR Nikkor.

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