I had today the chance to try the new Nikon D800 at our local camera store. As I was interested especially in iso performance, I did not pay attention to other features of the camera. I did not test the AF system, mainly because it’s the same as in the older D700 nor the movie function and other interesting new features. Though a nice feature has caught my attention. When you press the AF mode control button (inside the AF/MF switch, near the lens mount) to change the focus mode, you can see in the viewfinder the AF mode you’re selecting, AF-S or AF-C. Brilliant! I took my D700 with me and repeated the shots I took with the D800 so that I have something to compare the D800′s iso performance with. All shots are NEF conversions to jpeg in LR4, no noise reduction, no sharpening.  The ISO 200 shots have a subtle motion blur, I was shooting handheld at 1/13s at 35mm focal length. Too lazy to use the tripod :). Anyway, if you are reading this, you are probably more interested in other ISO values than 200.

My conclusions: Comparing the same image size, in this case the D800 images downscaled to 12 MP, the D800 is more than a stop better than the D700. At the pixel level, they have roughly the same amount of noise but the D800 has three times the resolution. Cool, ins’t it?