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Nikon D3 DSLR
Nikon steps up to the plate with its first full sized sensor camera
By Robert Jensen
All of you photographers out there who are serious about your images better start saving up your pennies for Nikon's new DSLR, the D3. While all the previous digital SLR offerings from Nikon have been in the DX format (23.6 x 15.8mm sized sensor) many a photographer has been waiting patiently for Nikon to introduce a full frame digital camera. Nikon has finally done so with the D3 body and its FX format sensor. The FX designation means it has a 36.0 x 23.9mm format sensor, which is almost exactly the same size as a frame of 35mm film (36 x 24mm).
Why have all these photographers been anticipating a full format Nikon DSLR? There are a couple of reasons. One is that status quo, DX format, cameras magnify the focal length of any lens used on them by 1.3x to 1.6x (up till the D3, Nikons have been 1.5x).
That's great for some people who shoot a lot of telephoto images because it turns their 80~200mm lens into a 120~300mm. However for landscape, architectural, skateboarding, fashion and many other subjects, that same magnification turns their wonderful 18~35mm wide angle into roughly a 28~50mm lens, throwing away the wide angle capabilities of the lens, which is the most useful to them.
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| D3 Front view. Click for full view |
So you can see why they've been frustrated since they either had to shell out for all new, expensive, wider angle zooms (and if you shot with prime lenses you were out of luck in many cases), or do without. Now that Nikon has introduced the D3, those photographers will not only be getting the use of all their wide angles lenses back but getting better images than they have with their DX format cameras of the same pixel count! Why is that? Because the heart of the image sensor is comprised of these things call photo sites. Think of the image sensor as a checkerboard with each section being a foot square and rain falling on it.
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| Sensor |
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| D3 inside |
Now your objective is to collect as much rainwater (light) as you can in a short time period. You're given the choice to put either one drinking glass or one bucket in the squares to catch the rain. It's a no brainer that you'll catch more water with the larger bucket. It's the same when trying to catch the light that's traveled through your lens. The larger the photo site the more light it collects. You may be asking yourself, why is THAT a good thing? Because the more light gathered means better shadow detail in your images and less noise.
Another new feature of the D3 (and the new Nikon D300 also) is being able to save your RAW (NEF) images in a larger 14-bit mode. The advantage of this feature is that it records the scene using 16,384 steps per Red-Green-Blue channel versus 4,096 steps used in older cameras. An easy way to picture this is thinking of a strip of paper that starts out on one end black and on the other end white. A 1-bit version of it would be divided down the center with white on one side and black on the other. A 2-bit representation would be four steps; black, dark gray, light gray and white. As you increase the number of bits you end up with finer and finer steps between pure black and pure white. Of course this works for the colors in the scene too, which will mean smoother gradations and less chance of ending up with 'banding' in your images.
If you're shooting uncompressed 14-bit RAW files with full sized JPEG files you're going to use up memory fast, which is why Nikon designed the D3 to hold two Compact Flash memory cards at the same time. You can set the camera to save your RAW files to one CF card and JPEG's to the other, fill up one card and then save to the other, or automatically create a backup copy on the second card.
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| CF Slots, of which the D3 sports two. |
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