A few of us had a lucky lookie session with the D3 this morning. As a noted salad dodger, it's difficult to keep me from food, but the choice between being first in line for a rumble with the D3 and stuffing my face with eggy, bacony bagels, surprisingly the D3 won out.
I had approximately one minute with the camera, so this isn't a review. It's just a quick hands-on report from someone who had a minute or so fumbling with the camera.
The D3 has a similar weight to the D2X and everything falls to hand in exactly the same way as before. The little Nintendo-esque thumb thingy has changed, but it still feels, er, right. That bigger screen is a boon, though. Menus - in the two seconds or so I got to tangle with the menu structure - seem very familar too, although the picture modes now have sensible names like 'brightness' and 'saturation'.
Looking down the viewfinder was like meeting an old friend. A big old friend. At first glance, it's like looking down an F5 or F6 viewfinder... a huge image, larger than that on my D2X (even with a DK-17M magnifier in place). The difference soon makes itself felt when you see all those little AF points in the middle of the viewfinder.
A Nikon guy snatched the camera from me briefly and engaged full 51-point auto tracking. This is scene led - it locks on a bit like face recognition and then stays locked on, with the little red AF point dancing from point to point as it tracks whatever you are focusing on. The effect through the viewfinder is a bit like that scene in the original Robocop where he tracks the pen just after being booted up. Apparently, it works by tracking shapes and adjusts the white balance on the fly, too.
I managed to fire off a frame or two. We were in a hotel basement, lit by low-voltage lighting. This is not exactly the ideal conditions for available light photography. Light levels were approximately EV2. That means roughly a two second exposure at f/2.8 for ISO 100. I used the new 14-24mm lens at f/2.8... at 1/125th sec. That's what ISO 25,600 does for you.
Sadly, if I had spent my youth studying close-up magic and sleight of hand instead of gallivanting around with all those zany academics, I'd have been able to quickly swap over the CF cards for my own one I'd palmed. However, the moment the CF door swung open, the Nikon folk swooped. So, there's no JPEG to leak and all I saw was the image on the back of that three-inch screen. Yes, ISO 25,600 is grainy... possibly not as grainy as my D2X at ISO 3,200, but not far off. I have seen far worse on the front covers of many a newspaper.
As for that 14-24mm, it's a big beasty, with a whopping great front element that will never be tamed by a filter. Yet, it doesn't feel much heavier or any less well balanced than, say, a 28-70mm on the front of a D2X. It's mindbendingly wide on the FX frame, and yet (as far as I could see from the LED screen) it doesn't vignette. And it's w-----i-----d-----e, really wide.
By the end of this long minute, I'd developed a strange rigidity in my fingers. I couldn't prize them off the camera. I also developed a curious desire to walk up to the nearest Nikon person and hand over money. It just felt so natural... that wasn't supposed to happen.
As I said from the outset, this is NOT a review, just a bunch of observations. Based on about a minute of hands-on. We'll see what the real thing is like later.
