Camera Envy

I have a Nikon D3 on loan from Nikon, and need to get the camera into FedEx by the end of the day. I'm loathe to return it, as all-knowing Nikon product manager Lindsay Silverman predicted. Fitted with Nikon's big new 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF-S zoom, it is a massive rig—so heavy that I found myself wanting a tripod mount on the lens, a weird idea for a wide-angle. But if you can't hold it, you don't need it.

With that lens, the full-frame, 12-megapixel Nikon is painfully sharp, though there appears to be a slight edge curvature at 14mm that I don't remember with Nikon's superb rectilinear 14mm f/2.8 fixed-focal-length wide-angle. You can see that a little in the photo here, but more important is that the D3 gives you the full angular goodness of this lens. I also used the camera with the new Nikon-mount Zeiss 50mm f/2 and 100mm f/2 macros. Talk about hair-splitting.

Something about the Nikon D3--its phenomenal build, the brilliance of its three-inch LCD display, its responsiveness--just makes you convinced, when you're shooting with it, that you're making better pictures. Of course you aren't, as we all know, but it's a good feeling anyway.

The level of control offered by the D3 is awesome. I've only just begun to plumb the camera's complexities, and now I have to return this not-quite-production body. But we'll get one back soon for an extended look, and in the meantime I'd have to agree with Mike McNamara at Popular Photography (see his writeup here) that this could just be Nikon's "greatest camera ever."

--Russell Hart