Nikon
D3 Review
© 2008 KenRockwell.com.
All rights reserved.
The Nikon D3 with 50mm f/1.4 AF-D. enlarge. I got mine from Ritz. Just as well I'd get another from Adorama, Amazon or B&H Photo Video. It helps me keep adding to this site when you use these links to get yours, thanks! These are difficult to find in stock so no dealer has any reason to discount them, so be very afraid of any offers at less than $4,999.
skip to index of detailed D3 review pages
News, 25 April 2008: Nikon D3 firmware v1.11 updates.
January 2008
My Nikon D3 lets me do things I've never been able to do, and makes it fast and easy. You don't need a review: unlike any other camera I can recall, just talk to anyone who owns the D3 and you'll hear praise gushing like no other camera. The Nikon D3 has no "buts," as in "I love it but..." Everyone just loves it. You'll hear the same thing from any photographer who had his hands on one for just a few minutes. The more someone knows about serious shooting, the more they love the D3.
The D3 just goes. It shoots and you get great images, period. Nothing is slow or gets in your way. It just goes.
The Nikon D3 is a lot more than reading reviews and specifications could ever suggest. Just like the D300, the D3 has image processing tricks that makes it easier to create exactly the image I want over even more conditions than ever before. The D3 then adds more speed, more finesse, more lens choices, triple the battery life of the D300 and a real-time viewfinder camera-level display on top of it.
The Nikon D3 is the best camera ever made by Nikon. It was announced on August 23rd, 2007. As of the beginning of 2008 it's just starting to trickle into the hands of photographers.
The Nikon D3 excels for news, sports and event photography where you need it to work under any condition. If you get knocked over and knocked out, you'll come up shooting with the D3 even if you're still seeing stars. The D3 just works as an extension of your imagination.
Nikon cameras, even the rangefinder cameras of the 1950s, have always been about hand-held use for news and sports. The Nikon D3 is the best of over 50 years of continuous camera and lens development.
The Nikon D3 incorporates many new tricks to let me create visibly better images more easily. It plays many subtle (and not-so-subtle) tricks to let me get better colors, better grays, better highlights and better shadows than any previous camera. The Nikon D3 even fixes lateral color fringes in some lenses. The Nikon D300 shares these same tricks.
The Nikon D3 is the first digital Nikon to use the full 24x36mm image area of traditional 35mm still film.
Nikon D3. enlarge.
My D3 really can crank at 9FPS, and the best part is that it only costs as much as every previous pro Nikon camera: $4,999.95.
Canon has nothing close: Canon DSLRS are either slower or smaller format. Canon has slower cameras with higher resolution more suited to landscape, studio and portrait photography.
While some people who don't have D3s have the time to fret over reviews and trifle over meaningless details, everyone I know who has a D3 is marveling at how it just works and lets them come away with great images. It just gets out of our way, which is the greatest compliment any photographer or artist can bestow on any tool.
My D3 works in more crazy lighting conditions than any previous camera. I can shoot at ISO 6,400 without any excuses. I can get good color rendition in any crappy lighting, even under orange high-pressure sodium street lights, due to the astoundingly large range of accommodation of the manual PREset (gray card) white balance.
For instance, here's a shot made under moonlight, hand held.
Sea under Moonlight, La Jolla, California (hand-held!)
No other camera could do this without a tripod, much less as a grab shot. Tripods are for wimps. See the dot at the top left? That's a planet.
Not only do I have my D3 set to choose the exposure and ISO automatically exactly as I would do, my D3 easily autofocused all by itself. Except for choosing a tungsten white balance to make the sky blue, if the sun came up my D3 would instantly set itself back to ISO 200 and a more reasonable exposure to grab whatever happened, perfectly.
I always shoot everything on Auto. I spend a lot of time presetting my cameras as I want them so all I have to do is point and shoot. A first for Nikon, you can save these settings as files which can be loaded on CF cards and shared among cameras. Here's my usual setup; try copying this NCSETUP2.BIN file to a CF card, stick it in your D3 and use MENU > WRENCH > Save/load settings > Load Settings to copy them to your camera. Watch it; this file is set to mark my images' EXIF data with my copyright info and prefixes the files with my choices of letters, so be sure to change these on your camera if you want them differently.
My Nikon D3 gives me:
Better Color top
Like the D300, the Nikon D3 allows me to set more vivid colors than any previous Nikon or Canon I've used.
Cranking up the colors gives me a look I love. It isn't simply blotto saturation. The D3 has a special magic about its colors when cranked up. It warms warm colors just as Fuji Velvia 50 does, without altering the cool colors.
I explain how to crank it at Nikon D3 and D300 Picture Controls.
This great color is enough of a reason to buy a D3 (or D300). Even a blind person can see the difference–you don't need a microscope.
Better Composition top
I've never seen a better finder than the one in my D3. It's big, bright and sharp - a far cry from the wimpy DX finders for which people settled in early days of digital photography. It's bigger than the D300 or any other small-format DSLR of which I know. Heck; any crummy discount 35mm film SLR from the 1980s has a bigger, better finder than any professional small format DSLR, even a D2X, from what I've seen.
For the first time since the extraordinary F4 of 1988, the D3 has a clear finder. It is even clearer than the D300's finder, because a.) the AF region and 12mm graticule is lighter (almost invisible, thank goodness) , and b.) the AF areas light up in red from out of nowhere, instead of going black as they do in the D300.
Let me emphasize that there are no scratched-in AF areas to interfere with composition. The D3 only lights up AF areas as needed, otherwise the finder is completely clear!
Better, there are so many AF areas that I can compose-in-place. No longer do I have to focus and recompose, or be lazy and compose based on the location of the AF areas.
The dummy auto AF-area selector mode (white rectangle on the selector) works great. It lets me compose and press the button to take a picture, skipping the old focus and recompose step of the past 75 years of hand-held photography!
Thank God! These focusing and composition improvements alone would be enough reason to buy a D3. Do you have any idea how pleasant it is to have a finder without all the garbage on top of your focusing screen?
Better Highlights and Shadows top
The D3, along with the D300, has a remarkable ability to tame extreme highlights and shadows, automatically. (You have to activate ADR in the menus, it's not a default). Nikon calls this "Active D-Lighting" in the D3's menus, which means nothing. I call it Adaptive Dynamic Range, or ADR.
Roll mouse over to see how ADR fixes blown-out, pizza-like highlights.
The Nikon D300 and D3, when ADR is set ON, have an uncanny ability to handle huge dynamic ranges better than any other Nikon. The D3 and D300 are the first Nikons that don't go blotto when overexposed. Just like film, being 1/3 or 2/3 stops over just makes the image lighter, not blowing-out facial highlights to look like old pizza!
The weakest point in digital capture, even in Hollywood's $250,000 digital cinema cameras which still can't replace film, has been that colored highlights, like sunsets, foreheads and bright stucco walls, turn into bands of weird colors as they wash out to white. The D300 appears to have conquered the problem so its highlights take on the same natural shoulder as film. Look carefully at how the hue of the wall changes from red to yellow as it washes out (ugly), but retains the same hue as it lightens with ADR ON.
These dynamic improvements alone are reason enough to get a D3 or D300.
Sharper Pictures top
The D3 has an amazing automatic ability to fix lateral color fringes.
The D3 actually makes lenses look better than they are!
This gives better, sharper results. There's no need to activate this, it just works, with AF and even old manual focus and fisheye lenses.
Because of this, the D3 also can make clearly better images in DX mode than other older DX cameras, even if they have higher resolution, with many lenses. (The D3's DX resolution is only 5 MP.)
I have compared this, but not exhaustively. If you want the best quality in DX and don't care about speed, the D300 does a better job and shares the D3's same innovations.
The D3 is unique in doing this for full-frame as well as DX images.
Insanely High ISOs that Look Good top
ISO 6,400 is normal. Use it all you want without any excuses. I know of no other digital camera that can do this. Here are some crappy party snaps made in almost no light at ISO 4,000. The D3 did a perfectly fine job, even if the color of the lighting didn't cooperate.
ISO 12,500 can be grainy, and ISO 25,600 is downright loaded with red dots, but still usable when you need it.
I only need ISO 6,400 to shoot under moonlight with my 28mm f/1.4 lens. You might need more with slower or longer lenses.
9 FPS - Easy! top
My D3 really can run at 9 FPS. I've clocked it, and it loves it.
Remember that exposure times add up when you have 9 of them in a second. Even at 1/60 you'll slow down the D3.
It also runs at 11 FPS without sequential metering or AF tracking in DX mode.
Wider Angles Than Any Other Pro DSLR System
The widest Nikon non-fisheye lens for a DX camera is the 12-24mm DX. In reality, it gets no wider than a 20mm lens on 35mm film or FX. Try it and you'll see.
With a 14mm or 14-24mm lens, I get a real 14mm equivalent on the D3. I'd need a nonexistent 9mm lens on a DX camera to give the same view.
Double Rainbow. Nikon D3, Nikkor 13mm f/5.6 AI-s.
The Nikon system includes a 13mm f/5.6 non-distorting lens made from 1975-1998. There are none available anywhere, but if you have one, you just outdid every other professional SLR system on earth.
Faster and Easier to Use top
The AF system just works. Set to the All Areas dummy mode (the big white rectangle), it really just finds the correct sensors and uses them without you or I having to jack any switches around for each shot.
From a convenience aspect, the larger 3" LCD screen is nice, but far nicer is how much faster playback responds to button presses. I can scroll around a magnified image much faster, and RGB histograms come up instantly instead of bogging down for a full second for each image as they did on the old D200.
7 Times the Battery Life of the D200, and 3 Times the Battery Life of the D300! top
My D3 gets about 3,000 shots per charge. My D300 gets about 1,000, and my D200 gets about 450.
I've made over 10,000 shots with my D3 in the past six weeks, and can't remember when I last charged it. I'm not buying a spare battery.
Minor D3 Complaints top
The only blunders of the D3 are trivial annoyances. The hackers haven't discovered any vast-conspiracy-style flaws like the banding of the D200 or the blinking green-lights-of-death of the D70. (Nikon fixed all those under warranty, and I never saw those problems on my cameras.)
1.) Auto ISO is still partially defective in manual exposure mode. It doesn't automatically deactivate when you go to manual exposure! You have to go to the menus to turn it off in manual exposure, otherwise the D3 tries its best to screw with your manual exposures. The D3 needs an additional menu option labeled "Deactivate Auto ISO during Manual Exposure?"
2.) The Fn button can only be programmed to do half of what it does on the D200. Specifically, on my D200 I have it set for flash exposure lock and hold, and to allow me to enter the focal length and speed of manual focus lenses for matrix metering. On the D3, I only can get one of those functions and have to trudge through menus again to get the other function. New on the D3 is the option to let the Fn button call up the level display in the right-hand bar graph!
3.) Manual lens data now only can be entered though deep menus. Once entered (only 9 lenses maximum, and each setting on a zoom takes one memory) you might be able to select among them with the Fn button, but forget easy, instant direct adjustment as you change lenses as you can on the D200. The D3 is similar to the F6 (10 memories), but the F6 makes better use of the Fn button.
If you use a couple of manual zooms, you can quickly fill the 9 spots. If you use a 28-85mm AI-s and an 80-200mm f/4 AI-s, those two lenses just stole 8 of the 9 spots! You'd need to program 28mm f/3.5, 35mm f/3.5, 50mm f/4 and 85mm f/4.5 for the 28-85mm, and then 80mm f/4, 105mm f/4, 135mm f/4 and 200mm f/4 for the second zoom. That leaves only one spot for an 8mm circular fisheye, an ultrawide or a long tele. I'm often having to revert to the menus, unlike the D200 which lets me set these directly.
This doesn't matter for any autofocus lens, since the D3 reads all the info directly. It only matters to people like me who also use Nikon's exquisite manual focus lenses. Thank God we shoot Nikon; Canon sh*t-canned manual focus FD lens compatibility back in 1985!
With Nikon and manual focus lenses, even ones from the 1950s that have been AI converted, we get matrix metering and full finder readout and EXIF data.
4.) There is no spring inside the CF card door to ensure the CF cards are fully seated when I close the door. I forgot once, and the D3 was alternately writing to the other CF card! It confused the dickens out of me until I figured out where the photos I was taking were going, since when the card wiggled out I only could see the half that made it to the second card.
This shows how great it is to have two CF cards loaded: any problem, and the D3 just goes on shooting.
5.) Custom function e3, modeling flash, is still set ON by default. This can cause blindness since it fires off a long, unexpected burst of flash when you hit the depth-of-field button. The first thing I did on my D3 after I cranked the saturation all the way up was to set e3 to OFF.
Everything has design flaws, don't worry. The fact that no one has found any real flaws with the D3 says a lot.
D3 Suggested Improvements top
(1 - 5 fix issues above.)
1.) Add "Cancel Auto ISO in Manual Exposure Mode?" menu option. (invention disclosure February 2008 or before.)
2.) Fix the broken Fn button so it can work as well as it did in the D200.
3.) Make manual lens data as easy to enter as in the D200. Make manual lens data appear in finder, with focal length displaying in the shutter speed digits and the f/stop in the f/stop display, when being changed via the Fn button.
4.) Add seating spring in CF card door.
5.) Set CFN E3 OFF by default so no one goes blind.
6.) Add a third, deeper, position in the shutter button, so we get Cl normally, but get Ch when we press HARD. This way way we can shoot normal stuff normally, and when the sh*t hits the fan, just push harder to blast at 9 FPS. This way we never miss the moment having to take the camera down to set it up to Ch. We can't leave it in Ch because too often we get two shots or more with each slow target/sniper-rifle-trigger push. (invention disclosure February 2008.)
7.) Add menu option in Auto ISO: "Set Lowest Shutter Speed based on Focal Length," and follow it with a factor, like 4x, 2x, 1x, 1/2x, 1/4x, etc. (invention disclosure February 2008 or before.)
This way we don't have to jack around the Lowest Shutter Speed setting as we zoom and change lenses.
8.) Now that we can set the colors to insane, much as Canon DSLRs have done since about 2004, we also need a faster way to get to our color settings than jacking through the menus. I need this because I set the colors to VIVID and +3 saturation most of the time, but if a person is in the shot, I throttle back to STANDARD and +2 saturation. On Canon we have been able to program the equivalent of the middle button of the multi-way thumb selector to call up our banks of preset Picture Controls to allow instant changes as fast as we change WB. Nikon needs to add this; having Manage Picture Settings in My Menu isn't fast enough. If it takes more than one click, the click I need to set the next menu could have been the click for the photo I just missed.
For instance, my tiny Casio EX-V8 pocket camera does this better. The Casio, a camera smaller than a deck of cards, has a knob on it with eight positions, and I can set at least two of them to totally different color settings. Thus I can shoot a thing in one position, and completely without menus, just turn the knob a click to get to my milder color settings for people. (I set the Casio's red rectangle to +2 saturation and +2 contrast, and set a BS mode, chosen with the [BS] setting next to the red rectangle, to +- 0 saturation and -1 contrast.)
9.) When I shoot fast, I want Image Review OFF, and when I shoot slowly, I want it ON. Nikon's Setting Banks don't save and recall it, so as I shift styles I always have to dig into the menus, which sucks. Nikon should redo the firmware so that holding the PLAY button for more than two seconds toggles this mode on and off. (invention disclosure 1:23 PM PST, 26 February 2008.)
10.) Improve manual focus indication to work as Canon has done for years. In Canon, each sensor blinks in red as perfect focus is achieved there. Canons are great: turn the manual focus ring, and sensors blink at the exact instant each part of the image pops into focus. It makes manual focus ten times faster than Nikon's single-sensor-at-a-time null indicator.
More Pages of My D3 Review top
This review has dozens of detailed pages about the D3. This page above has been the summary of what's really important.
Listed Alphabetically:
High ISO Comparison: D300, D200, D3 and Canon 5D
High ISO Comparison vs Canon 5D (same lens)
Performance: Shooting (pre-sensor)
Performance: Capture, Processing, Data and Display (post-sensor)
Picture Controls and Image Settings
Sharpness Compared among D300, D3 and Canon 5D
More Information:
Nikon's one-sheet printed D3 brochure
Nikon (Japan) shares D3 example images15 September 2007
Photoshop God Scott Kelby sees the Nikon D3 at NFL games. I suspect that as fast as Nikon can ship D3s that we'll be seeing them everywhere. They just GO! For some weird reason, Scott's page takes forever to load on my machine.
Recommendations top
The D3 is an action camera. If you're shooting news, sports, events and action, do it.
If you ordered your D3 back in August as I did, you'd have gotten it back in 2007 as I did.
If you're still waiting to order, the backlog is far deeper today. As I predicted in August 2007, the D3 is be one of those Nikon products, like the 18-200mm VR, that is more popular than Nikon's ability to manufacture it. Order it and wait.
If you want the best flexible camera system for landscapes and portraits, I'd look at the Canon 1Ds Mk III. The Nikon D3X, the Nikon for landscapes and portraits, doesn't exist.
If you're tired of the digital madness which has otherwise reasonable people blowing five grand every year and a half on the newest digital SLR, see my Free Full-Frame Digital SLR article.
PLUG
If you find this as helpful as a book you might have had to buy or a workshop you may have had to take, feel free to help me continue helping everyone.
Thanks for reading!
Ken
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