D700 - How Good is the High ISO?

I've been impressed with the high ISO of the D3s, Nikon's latest high ISO flagship. There have been rather stunning 10,000 and 12,800 ISO images posted today. It appears that Nikon have pulled a rabbit out of their hats and given the D3s a 1 to 1.5 stop improvement over the D3 / D700 ...

This is simply amazing ... as 1.5 stops is about what you get when moving from APS-C to full frame sensors ... wow.

Anyway ... I thought I'd run my own little experiment this evening ... I shot an image of my D300 with my D700 ... once at 6400 ISO and once at 12800 ISO. These images were then converted in ACR with only minimal tweaking of the noise sliders. I added crops of the lens cap to show how the texture and chroma noise come out ...

I must say that I am quite impressed ... this camera is no D3s, but it certainly is quite clean at 6400 and not bad at all at 12800. I am looking forward to shooting it in dim situations ...

6400


12800


Not too shabby ...

Edit: I posted a denoised version of the 12800 ISO image (Topaz Denoise 3) on DPReview in response to a question, so here it is. This is not bad at all for web use. I bet I could squeeze out a decent 8x10 as well ...