I missed this earlier this week, but this shot is a powerful demonstration of the ISO performance of the D3 and D700.
as Rockwell says:
…The noise isn’t much worse, but what is much worse is that the details are smeared over by the strong noise reduction. Look at the fur. It looks fine in the D300, until you look at the D700 or D3 and see what was smudged over. If you somehow reduced the noise reduction of the D300 to recover the lost detail, you’d have an hellacious amount of noise.
Compared to most other cameras the D300 is performing incredibly well. There is a loss of detail, but this is ISO 3200! More important for me as a D80 owner is the usablity of the shot. The noise grain isn’t bad, there’s no color fringing, no hotspots, and no weird color blocking, all very inspiring. Most likely you’d probably not want to shoot this high and perhaps keep your barrier of usability at ISO 1600 where the grain is substantially finer, but that’s nothing to sneeze at…right now I don’t like to go past ISO 400 and cringe at using that.
Then there’s the D3/D700. As expected they look the same, and as we’re all familiar with by now, the noise management at this ISO is phenomenal. The grain is very fine and not unpleasing to the eye and better still, plenty of detail to be found. And it’s that detail that makes full frame format so compelling for me right now.
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