Well, hot diggety-dog. The D3x is, as expected, inherently noisier than it’s noise-optimized good twin, the D3. However, it appears to me that Nikon wasn’t just blowing smoke when they claimed that the noise processing engine in the D3x has tamed much of the noise generated by the more densely-packed D3x sensor.
With in-camera NR turned on, and under these limited test conditions, I found the “noise-to-resolution” tradeoff to be strongly in the D3x’s. I also found that using Noise Ninja in a post-processing environment had additional benefit, seemingly with – to my untrained eye – very little further loss of sharpness. I would also comment that performing additional noise reduction in the raw converter of your choice may also yield very satisfactory results in lieu of using Noise Ninja … we’ll have to wait and see once all the engineers have enabled their converters to handle D3x files.
As for the underwater world … this will be the real test of the D3x vs. the D3 for myself and my colleagues. Digital cameras optimized for terrestrial photography (e.g. ALL of them) show their worst sides from a noise perspective when taking essentially monochromatic images of blue water that has not-so-subtle light gradients and lots of junk floating around. The D2x was a big improvement on the D100 in making underwater images, and the D3 was an even bigger improvement on the D2x. I suspect that when we all get the D3x underwater in the deep blue wide-angle world, we’ll find we have to give up a smidgen of noise and smoothness of those pesky blue and cyan gradients, but will get the great benefit of being able to crop down our wide-angle images for compositional purposes, and still be able to print at huge sizes. That’s worth the trouble and, for some of us, the expense of this new and promising camera.
As for macro photography, where you have control of the light, can shoot at ISO 100, and are on top of your subjects … hoo boy! I predict those 3ft by 5ft metallic prints of pygmy seahorses will never look more dazzling than when captured on this remarkable camera.
