The vast flexibility of the programming options was a bit daunting to me at first, but now that I'm getting more and more familiar with
everything that the camera can do, I really appreciate having those options
. I do tend to use the Shooting Menu banks to store favourite settings as well, although I struggle to remember which settings will actually be stored to a particular menu and which ones are carried over as you switch between banks
.
It's a God-send to have the 'My Menu' option too, where you can program in your most used (or hardest to find
) functions. Personally, I love to use the artificial horizon overlay, when composing landscape shots, although I struggled at first to find it in the full menu. Now, it's right at the top of my list of favourites
! It even appears as on overlay in Live View, if you press the right buttons.
Aside from all that, the picture quality
is pretty fantastic. I honestly didn't realise what all the fuss about the high ISO performance was, until I got a D90 last week and compared 12MP of DX sensor at ISO 1600 with 12MP of FX at the same setting :|. There's a completely different (and rather ugly) look to the pixelation that occurs when you over-crop shots, too. The D700 retains a certain 'dignity', whereas the 100% crops from my D90 seem to break up and show erratic contrast levels, when pushed to the same extremes :shrug:. Of course, if both cameras are used 'properly', then this issue should never arise, it's just that sometimes I really need to crop wildlife shots (on account of not having 4,000GBP for the appropriate lens
) and things can get messy!
I recently bought a grip for it too and just love the idea that I can switch between using it with or without, depending on what I'm shooting. I will be shooting some 'portraits' at a party in a few weeks time, which means holding the camera on it's side, with a 70-200 f/2.8 lens and an SB900 hanging of it, for about 3 hours
- the grip will
really help there! On other days though, I just plonk the D700 on a tripod and make long exposures of sunsets, or city skylines - no need to carry the additional weight of the MB-D10 for
that kind of stuff.
Finally, I'm really glad that I got the D700 as my first serious DSLR (instead of the D300, or the D80), because now my lens collection is nearly all full-frame compatible. As long as we're not all shooting Panasonic GF1s in the years ahead, that should prove to be the right decision
.