Nikon’s new flagship D3S has squeezed both HD video into its full-frame shooting body, but the real news is that the camera can literally see in the dark — the brand new sensor has a standard top ISO setting of 12,800 and can be jacked up to an unbelievable ISO 102,400 with the “Hi” settings.
Nikon’s D3X has turned out to be an inspired product. The 24 megapixel camera has effectively shut up the pixel-peepers and let the company focus on making a camera that actually takes great pictures instead of one which just makes giant files. The D3X is effectively a big piece of juicy meat that Nikon threw to those number-lovers and it worked, distracting them from the real innovation going on within smaller sensors.
The D3S is, as the name suggests, a tweaked D3 rather than an all-new camera. But what tweaks! The sensor is the most obvious change. The full-frame CMOS chip still captures 12.1 megapixel images, but the bigger pixels can fill up with more photons and allow the above mentioned standard setting of ISO 12,800, up from 6,400 on the D3. And if this is anything like the D3, expect that crazy number to actually give you very usable pictures — the D3 and D700 (which share a sensor) shoot almost noiseless pictures at 6400 (although dynamic range does suffer).
The extended (or “emergency”) ISO setting gains two stops, jumping from 25,600 to a staggering 102,400. Again, going on D3 performance this will remain an emergency setting, but a very usable one.
And then there is video, the big camera feature of the last year, and in this case Nikon’s first full-frame video-shooting DSLR. It shoots motion 720 x 1024 JPEG files at 24fps, and the auto-focus system has been tweaked to work better in contrast-detection mode, the one used whenever the mirror is up.
From there, we see some other welcome additions. The D3S gets a self-cleaning sensor (at last), a dedicated live-view button (its place on the top-left knob has been taken by a new quiet-shutter mode), and slightly bigger release lever for the battery compartment. A faster 9fps burst rate (11 fps in DX-mode) will now fill up the double-sized buffer in 48 frames, and there are some tweaks to the in-camera D-lighting (although if you are shooting RAW you can ignore this).
There is more, but that part of the list looks more like firmware tweaks than new features. The D3S, then, looks like a very solid successor to the already great D3. If there were any doubt that digital cameras have superseded film, it has now been blown away. In fact, film is starting to look as quaint and limited as libraries are next to the internet. £4200 (That's $6,700, although it's likely to be cheaper when the US pice is decided) .
Product page [Nikon]
