Well, since the football pics seemed to create some exciting conversation, I thought I would share some more.
I created another album "D7000 test pics" for you guys to do some pixel peeping.
All the EXIF data should be there for you.
Some notes: All pics are unedited. I either resized the full picture or made 100% crops. All were captured in Jpeg. (I also captured them in RAW, but I haven't gone through them yet).
The roof top and flower pics were taken with LOW NR. The horses were at Normal NR. I think Low NR looks much sharper and the noise is still good.
You'll noticed I took several shots of the same scene with different EV settings. I think stepping down -.3 to -.7 EV really represents the true ambient light.
I also did a "shoot-off" between my D5k and D7k with the 18-105 lens.

Enjoy the pics.

Wayne

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

Hi Wayne,

Thanks for sharing the images!
Good Luck and Enjoy your Nikons!

Best Regards,
Marty

Thanks for that. I am impressed with the 3200 ASA picture!

More convinced that ever now!

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

Thanks for your pics, checked out your album and also enjoyed seeing the NHRA pics there, i am a big time nitro fan

Wayne

Thanks for posting.

These images are pretty remarkable. They look very sharp even zoomed in on a 100% crop. F/8 is pretty forgiving with regard to focus, so the 18-105 does a nice job. ISO 3200 looks fully usable with good lighting. We're also still seeing JPEG's - so there is potential for still better images with RAW processing.

Eric Bowles
Nikonians Team
My Gallery
Workshops

Nikonians membership — my most important photographic investment, after the camera

The ISO 3200 pictures are very impressive. Could you shoot some in poor light conditions and maybe even take the ISO to 6400?

Visit
My Nikonians Gallery
NorcrossPics.Com

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

I did not notice your remark about some of the photos being from the D5000 when I first looked at the images. I think that I am more impressed with the D5000 3200 ISO image, but I would need to download them first and view them side by side to know for sure.

All and all, the D7000 sharpness looks really good from this sample.

Thank you for posting them!

How about going to the limit - H 1.0 and H 2.0 like the images of the house? Something with a dark area that would show noise?

My D7000 body is on order. Looking forward to getting in the action.

Eric Bowles
Nikonians Team
My Gallery
Workshops

Nikonians membership — my most important photographic investment, after the camera

Wayne,

I'd be curious to see images with noise reduction turned OFF. That would give a good indicator of what we will see with RAW images when it eventually gets into NX2.

Regards,

""

Yes the D5000 surprised me with the iso 3200 photo, actually all the D5000 photos surprised me. If you were to see them at 100% the D7000 is the winner. The roof and the black part of the driveway didn't look so good on the D5000.

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

Hang in there Bob, I'm working on it.

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

That's my next step. Like I said, the low NR pics were noticably sharper.
I have to admit when I first starting looking at some of my photos with the D7k I wasn't real impressed. The default settings are not impressive (over exposed, flat colors, and soft). Now I have started changing the settings and I'm becoming happy with my new camera.
For Jpegs I've found: use Landscape mode and increase sharpness to 5 or 6 (4 is default), reduce NR, and decrease exposure by 1/3 or 2/3.

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

That is good I guess. The D7000 should look better. But the D5000 looks pretty good. I'd like to see some shots @ 3200ISO with poor light from both cameras. Under good lighting conditions, it is harder to see the problem areas of high ISO. Thanks again for sharing!

>I'd be curious to see images with noise reduction turned OFF.

Keep in mind that even when noise reduction is turned off, the camera automatically applies a small amount of noise reduction at certain high ISO settings. In those circumstances the noise reduction is less than when the user enables the "low" setting. Sorry that I don't remember which ISO settings are affected, but that information is provided in the manual.

Author of "IDimager Version 5 Workbook"

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

>the camera automatically applies a small amount of noise reduction at certain high ISO settings. In those circumstances the noise reduction is less than when the user enables the "low" setting. Sorry that I don't remember which ISO settings are affected

For the D7k it is 1600 and higher. So you can have no NR up to iso 1250.

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

The 6400 image is pretty darn good as well, and as it was your first night shoot with the new machine, I think you did well.

Thanks for sharing.

Rob

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

I really like the ISO1600 (and even 3200?) stuff, looks really good, THANKS for the examples. I will be interested to see if I can set Auto-ISO increments in partial stops so that for example one could set a maximum auto-iso value of 1250 to avoid the non-discretionary noise reduction coming on. Or vice-versa I might decide that I can tolerate it to ISO2000 as a general Auto-ISO maximum value.

I routinely set my D300 to 6 or even 7 for sharpening. I find it allows me to better evaluate critical sharpness while in the field. Your settings of 6 seem likewise good and sharp.

Working on chores these past weekends while I await the D7K coming in. That way I can build a positive brownie point bank up. Once the camera comes in I want to do some serious shooting with it right away

And even video, I want to really start working that, maybe using my gimbal (black widow), and an external mic.

Best regards, SteveK

'A camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.' -- Dorothea Lange
My Nikonians gallery
My Nikonians Blog