I should explain this pic. The bride is the Duke of Roxburghe's daughter and I decided to join the press pack chasing her car on leaving the church. The D700 was fitted with a 24-70mm (with hood attached) and set to single AF, centre focus point, single shot, AF priority (supposed to block the release unless AF was confirmed), program mode, and ISO 800 was set as this suited most of the other pix.

On reaching a spot just ahead of the car, I flipped the built-in flash up and quickly zoomed and tracked as she came by, but this was a very fast action - not a matter of focusing, holding, refocusing or anything like that. The release was not pressed until she was framed as seen.

The D700 produced several other shots with poor focus (normally focusing behind the subject) but this was extreme, and I have not had anything like it the last few years of using DSLRs. Had this been important (i.e. if I was a genuine car-chasing pressman, or a wedding photographer aiming for a candid) I would have been pretty angry with the camera. We subsequently did some ad hoc tests with the D3 and D700 - they have the same focus module - carefully ironing out any possible setting differences, and the D700 seemed inexplicably slower to detect focus changes and react.

While there is no reason to think this will be so, apart from observations in a couple of weeks testing the D700, I suspect as the camera reaches the market we will hear some talk about the responsiveness of the focus system.

If it's any consolation, another photographer with a Canon 1Ds MkII was busy deleting OOF images and appeared to be getting a high proportion of badly focused shots, but he was using a machine-gun firing technique while I was shooting single frames. I have never really got used to the 5fps burst idea, coming originally from the school of observation and careful timing!