Nikon officially introduced the Nikon D700 FX 12.1 MP (35mm format equivalent) digital SLR on July 1, 2008. The D700 is often referred to as a “D3 in a D300 body”. Take a D3, put it in a smaller body, make some nifty but modest cost-cutting changes, cut the price almost in half, and you have a D700. So how close is the D700 to the D300?
The D700 shares a number of features with the D300. Both feature a powerful 51-point AF system, a high-resolution 3-inch VGA monitor with Live View, the same 1005-pixel metering system, along with an HDMI port for connection to HDTVs, albeit with a minijack on the D700. Both are also hard and offer resistance to dust and moisture.
For camera body, the dimension of D300 is about 147 x 114 x 74mm (5.8 x 4.5 x 2.9 inches), D700: about 147 x 123 x 77mm (5.8 x 4 .8 x 3.0 inches). Without battery, the weight of the D700 is up 995g and the D300 is 825g. Therefore, the D300 is slightly smaller and lighter than the D700.
The main difference between the two cameras is that the D700 uses a full frame FX sensor and the D300 uses the 1.5x DX crop sensor. The D700 employs the exact same 12.1-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor as the D3, which conforms to Nikon’s FX format and delivers images with 4256 x 2832 pixels when paired with an FX-compatible lens. Like the D3, you can still use DX-format lenses, but with a cropped portion of the sensor, offering 5-megapixel images.
The viewfinder of the Nikon D700 features an eye-level pentaprism with a high refractive index and provides 95% frame coverage at 0.72x magnification. It is not as accurate as the D300 or D3, which offer 100%.
Now let’s talk about sensor size. The D700 uses a size of 36 x 24 and the pixel density is only 1.4 MP/cm2 compared to the size of 23.6 x 15.8 and the pixel density of 3.3 MP/cm2. It means that technically the D700 should have a cleaner file, since the pixel density is almost half that of the D300.
The Nikon D300 has a 70-300mm VR lens and you effectively get a lens that has a 450mm reach at the telephoto end of the zoom range. This is useful when you are shooting wildlife or sports where your subjects are far away. The same lens on the D700 would result in photos where the subject won’t take up as much space in the frame as it would on the D300.
In a word, the Nikon D700 is basically a Nikon D300 sized version of the Nikon D3 digital SLR. Major advances in performance and design first introduced with the Nikon D3 and D300 have been incorporated into the D700 along with some differentiating features and functionality. But the D300 is much cheaper than the D700, almost half the price of the D700. So whether it’s worth upgrading your D300 to D700 depends on your needs.
