Nikon D700 Review: why this full-frame DSLR still matters

Writing a review of the Nikon D700 today, 17 years after its release, may seem far from useful, and that’s why this is not actually a review. I still use the term because it’s what usually makes articles discoverable online, but this won’t be a classic review. 

For starters, it makes few sense enumerating the technical features of the camera, since they won’t be compared with its contemporary alternatives, and they will be useless for informing a buying decision. And if we compare the numbers to nowadays cameras, then the sounds of the numbers alone may drive someone away from this article before it’s even started.

So, if this is not a review, what will it be? What can we say today about this old camera, and why is it even relevant to talk about it?

If you are spending some time on YouTube and looking for channels that talk about photography, you may have realized that these channels are mostly about gear, not photography — and then that many of them sooner or later will talk about the Nikon D700. 

These channels all follow the same script, that I can summarize here with a selection of keywords: built like a tank, filmic look, noise like grain, legendary camera, amazing colors, it forces you to slow down. And so on.

This is usually accompanied by random shots of mundane scenes, and maybe a photowalk. You will rarely see any photo that will justify anything the video says about the camera. Nothing that couldn’t have been done with another tool. Any other tool.

So, the whole romanticizing of the Nikon D700 turns out to be content for the sake of content. For me, most of these are just attempts at producing videos that capitalize on a popular argument, for feeding the algorithm and earn from ads. Because the Nikon D700 is indeed a popular argument.

This camera accomplished a move that Nikon repeated a couple of other times. Last one, with the combo Z9 / Z8. They produced a great flagship, the D3, and then brought most of it inside a smaller and cheaper package, the D700. It provided some features that at the time were surely impressive and that helped making it a darling of the professionals.

A very good sensor that traded a bit of resolution for better high ISO image quality; a body that was created for professional photographers and featured everything they needed, from the solidity and weather resistance to the well thought ergonomics. Put some high end Nikkor glass in front of it and you have quite the versatile and powerful setup. And that’s what countless professionals did at the time.

This is a camera that belongs to a different time indeed, a time where marketing departments were relying on what professionals really looked for. We were still far from the race for the highest numbers and newest tech (megapixels, focus points, 8k, AI AF, etc).

Photographers wanted better image quality in low light, they wanted a camera body they could depend upon, they wanted realistic colors straight out of camera, they wanted intuitive physical controls. And this camera delivered.

Why am I talking of this camera in 2025?

I’ve been shooting with Nikon for job since forever. I used other brands too, most brands actually, but Nikon is what I trust the most when it comes to work. Not because I say Nikon is the best: I just prefer it. I am an architectural and luxury real estate photographer though I venture into fashion and commercial photography from time to time. 

With time I built a good selection of Nikon lenses and camera bodies. As many readers probably know, I also shoot a lot with the Ricoh GR II and with the Olympus Pen-F, but lately I am gravitating more and more towards Nikon, and it became not uncommon to bring the D850 with me in my backpack also for personal photography.

The D850 is a dream to use, and I don’t mind the weight. There is a problem though. At least, it is a problem for me. The files are huge. I don’t need to always shoot photos with 45mp of data.

They fill my hard drives and slow down my editing. When I shoot portraits, I capture so much stuff I don’t need. Skin pores, small pimples, gray hair, it’s all there and it makes post producing slower. 

So I started looking for a camera that gave me less resolution, that could use my Nikon glass, that had a professional body and possibly not bigger than the D850. The Nikon D700 did fit the description, and so I got one.

I was aware of it of course. Back when it was released, I could only dream of affording it. How things have changed! With 300 euros I got one in a very good condition, with around 70k shots and two batteries. And so my adventure with the D700 began!

My every day kit is made of the D700, two batteries, a Nikkor 28mm f2.8 Ai-S, a Nikkor 50mm f1.8 G, a 32GB Compact Flash card. That’s around 600 euros in total. I sometimes may take some other lens with me, but these are the two lenses I always have in the backpack. This system allows me to shoot pretty much everything I need.

If I had to choose a favorite focal, it would be the 28mm. If I had to choose a lens to complement it, it would be the 50mm. And that’s what I am doing.

I mentioned my backpack a couple times. It’s not a photographic one. I hate photographic bags. Mine is a normal every day backpack that I usually bring along because I like to always have with me a book, stuff for writing and sketching, maybe the laptop and other small items. I don’t like to keep things in pockets.

So, I just added the camera and lenses inside of it. I understand this is not a situation everyone can relate to, and many could find it cumbersome to go out with a small every day backpack. For me, the advantages definitely surpass the weight and size problem.

The price.

I also mentioned that I spent 600 euros for my every day system. Please, let’s stop and think about it for a moment, because it’s a huge part of why I believe it makes sense to talk about the D700 today.

We will get to the more photographic content, and I think by watching the photos in the article you can already guess that yes, with the D700 it’s possible to take photos that make sense in 2025. But let’s go back to the cost.

The Nikon D700 is a democratic tool. I won’t say it costs few, because I know people that earn 300 euros in a month. Not every country has the same salaries and cost of life. So I can not say this camera is cheap. Cheap for who? But if we look at what it offers and how it compares to the costs of modern photographic gear, we can say the camera is surely priced very conveniently, to use an euphemism.

With 300 euros you can buy a full frame professional camera, capable of producing professional photographs. With few hundreds more you can buy very good lenses, like the two ones I mentioned: the 28mm f2.8 Ai-S is the second best 28mm ever produced by Nikon, and the 50mm f1.8 G is the best F mount 50mm from Nikon. Together, used, they costed me less than 300 euros.

It makes me sort of mad to see people wanting to get into photography being sad because they can’t afford what the marketing tells them they need. YouTube is a great offender of course, with its constant flow of reviews for the latest and greatest tech. There will never be a good enough camera or lens, because they need to sell you something new, something that will solve problems you didn’t think you had. I am so sick of this.

These people could instead buy something like the D700 and start learning to take photos. If they love photography, they can get a professional, versatile tool and start learning what matters: seeing the light, finding subjects, exposing correctly, and so on. Instead, they spend the time on forums, Reddit, YouTube, learning details about tech, marketing terms, rumors.

A French actress once told me: these are not creators, they are consumers. And I think it’s true. But I also think some of them may be creators that companies turned into consumers, by covering their passion and curiosity with tons of ads and marketing pressure.

Yes this is going to be a long article! And I confess, the D700 is actually a rhetoric instrument for touching some arguments I deeply care about. But this article is also actually about the D700.

The sensor.

The camera has a full frame 12 megapixels CMOS sensor (model NC81338L), manufactured by Nikon. Some say it was manufactured by Matshushita, but really, who cares. After this one, Nikon started designing the sensors but having other companies produce them, and nowadays they use Sony sensors on which they put their own spin.

This sensor on the D700 has a native ISO range of 200-6400, 12.2 EV of dynamic range and the camera can use it for saving 14bit raw files.

12mp may seem few, so let’s check some data.

An Instagram posts requires 1.1MP.

A 4K screen requires 8.3MP.

A 5K screen requires 14.7MP.

An A4 print at 150 DPI requires 2.2MP.

An A4 print at 300 DPI requires 8.7MP.

An A3 print at 150 DPI requires 4.3MP.

An A3 print at 300 DPI requires 17.2MP.

This means that a camera with 12MP like the D700 can cover most of the amateur and professional scenarios in terms of resolution. Higher resolutions are only needed for printing really huge when high DPI is requested, or if we need to crop a lot. And yet they keep trying to sell us 40, 60, 100 MP cameras!

The inconvenient truth is that most cameras from last 18 years or so can cover the requirements of most professionals and amateurs. So why do I use a D850 and Z8 instead of the D700, for my job? The answer is the importance of dynamic range in my profession.

The D850 has 14.8 stops of DR vs the 12.2 stops of the D700, and dynamic range is making shooting and editing architecture and luxury real estate faster. “Faster” is very important. And the Z8 is what I mostly use for video.

Let’s go further on this topic. Negative film has an estimated dynamic range between 12 and 15 stops, while slide film’s dr is included between 4 and 6 stops. So the D700 with its 12.2 stops is vastly better than slide film and it somewhat matches negative film. Film behaves differently than sensors, but the numbers are still helpful for understanding that we already have so much! Of course I would dream of a sensor with 20, 30 stops of dynamic range, but the reality is that Slim Aarons shot marvelous photos with Kodachrome and 4-6 stops of latitude.

Once you start taking these number into consideration, you start realizing how much the camera manufacturers are trying to brainwash us into thinking we need more. We don’t need the latest and greatest.

I could actually shoot also for my job using the D700, if I wanted. It would mean I need to be more careful and understand I lose those 2 stops of dynamic range, but it would possible, also because I often use flashes anyway.

When I compare using the D700 to using the D850, what I notice the most is that I have indeed less dynamic range and I must use it more carefully. With the D850, I can often expose for the foreground and bring back an almost white overexposed sky.

With the D700 it’s better to expose for the highlights and try to recover the shadows. Or let’s say it’s better to give highlights the priority. What I usually do is expose for the highlights and then I raise the exposure a bit to bring some more detail to the shadows. We can say I try to keep the priority between highlights/shadows around 60/40 %.

The autofocus performance in low light is also worse than the D850 / Z8, as expected. But I mean very low light. Almost pitch black.

The Nikkor 28mm f2.8 Ai-S is a manual lens: since the D700 has no split screen like analog reflex cameras, focusing manually means either trusting the focus confirmation dot or using hyperfocal. One thing I noticed with this lens is that it seems optimized for giving great results for subjects that are quite close. If I focus on something that is, let’s say, 5 or 10 meters away, then I end up on infinite and unless I used very small apertures, the resolved detail won’t be optimal.

The sensor being 12mp, we get the advantage of being able of shooting at f11 or sometimes f16 without incurring in sensible diffraction, while on the D850 with its 45mp sensor it’s usually a good idea to stay maximum at f8, and with the Pen-F at f5.6. This means that with optimal light, it’s possible to have quite a deep focus with the D700. Of course, we are still talking of a 12mp sensor, so don’t expect to find who knows how much detail in the shots.

If you want crazy levels of detail and impressive dynamic range, then this is not the camera for you. But I ask you: do you want that detail? Or do you need it? These are very different situations.

I remember being amazed at shots made with Phase One and Hasselblad medium format cameras, where you could zoom and zoom and zoom in a portrait and count the eyelashes and see the pores in the skin of the model, until I asked myself, what is it for?

I don’t want that level of detail. I want to capture reality in a pleasant way, with realistic and interesting colors and a good tonal rendering. If a job requires extreme detail and resolution, that’s a different situation. But what the D700 offers is more than enough in most cases.

The colors.

Many YouTube videos say the D700 offers magical. I don’t like that, because many expect to pick up this camera and get some Kodachrome moment or something like that. I don’t think there is magic at work, here. But we are talking of a very good sensor and very good processing for sure.

The colors produced by the D700 are extremely pleasing, and especially when it comes to portraits and skin tones. Nikon did a very good job balancing its color science. I rarely have to color grade my pictures, unless I mess up something while shooting. With the D700, the colors are so nice that I just convert from raw to jpg applying some contrast, selective sharpening and maybe some masking. That’s all.

My D700 is usually set to use the D2XMODE3 or D2XMODE2 color profile. 

These profiles were developed by Nikon to emulate the color rendering characteristics—including saturation, contrast, and tonality—of the original in-camera “Color Mode” settings from the D2X/D2XS cameras.

They were later made available as optional Picture Controls for use in Nikon’s software (like Picture Control Utility 2) and are also sometimes found as Camera Matching profiles in Adobe products like Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for older Nikon models (such as the D700).

There are three profiles:

D2XMODE1 (Mode I): apparently designed for natural portrait skin tones and rich gradation.

D2XMODE2 (Mode II): it produces images with rich texture and color.

D2XMODE3 (Mode III): this one reproduces the green of trees and blue skies vividly without the need for additional saturation or processing. This is typically a more punchy, vibrant profile.

I think the Standard color profile is also a nice starting point, but I find that these D2X mode profiles offer something that is most of the times already good for me. They can sometimes bring very intense colors and that’s not everyone’s tase. The same as with Ricoh GR II Positive Film though.

I had troubles finding these profile online, so I thought of putting them in a zip file for everyone to download them and install them on their D700 camera: https://andreabianco.eu/files/Nikon-D2XMODE.zip

All the color photos in this article were shot with these two color profiles and received no additional color grading. As mentioned before, all I did was play a bit with the tone curve, highlight/shadows, and sometimes doing a bit of masking.

I saw many D700 reviews and videos where the photos were shot with the D700, but then graded with presets, film simulations and so on: what’s the point? How is that helping anyone understand what the camera produces? So for this article I decided to only share the actual colors that get out of the camera.

I don’t say these D2X profiles are always ideal nor the best way to experience the D700, but they work for me.

Another thing I do on each photo is to bring sharpening to 0. Lightroom defaults it to 40 and I don’t like to have sharpening on all the picture. Especially since sharpening is a very delicate topic on a 12mp photo.

At first I used the masking mode to bring the sharpening only to the edges, but I then decided I just prefer to have no sharpening at all, and just add it selectively where I really need it.

We are told we need sharp detail, but I don’t think that’s what I want when I take a picture. I usually want to capture a moment, a special light that I think is beautiful. Whenever I pick up the camera I never think “let’s capture those eyelashes!”. I think: let’s capture this moment, this light.

Each photo includes information, and the amount of information we need depends on the destination of the photo. When I shoot for a client, I know how much information I must capture. When I shoot for myself, I also know. And it’s much less.

The noise.

The D700 is also known for having a pleasant noise, and that’s true. My idea is that Nikon does some baked-in chroma noise reduction and leaves the luminosity alone, so the result is something less obviously digital.

In some situations it may pass for film grain, if you don’t zoom and compare it to actual grain. Grain is made of blobs, digital noise is made of pixels, but the look may occasionally be — again, if not zooming — somewhat similar. 

The thing is, I don’t care much about how much it looks like grain, but I do care about the fact that I don’t feel it ruins my pictures. I shot at 3200 ISO and I think these are absolutely usable photos. I would not be that confident shooting with at 3200 ISO with the Pen-F, for instance.

Some may say that software noise reduction is now very good, and it usually is, at least on surface. The truth is that we can’t grow back detail that was lost. Noise is by definition eroding detail. What AI tools do is try to guess the lost detail, rebuilding it according to their databases of references.

The final result may look fine, but is it real? Especially when it comes to faces, I prefer noise than having software trying to guess what should be present instead of the noise.

Some are fine with that, I am not. The D700 gives me a noise profile I can live with, and to be honest, I actually like it and think its adds a nice touch to the final photos.

OVF vs EVF.

Some say a big advantage of the mirrorless over the dslr is the fact that on the mirrorless, the viewfinder shows you the final picture you will get. I would argue that’s not exactly the case, and here’s why.

What we see in the EVF is an 8 bit bitmap showing an interpretation of what the camera will capture. If you are saving jpg files, then that interpretation will coincide with the saved file. But if you are shooting raw, then that interpretation is not accurate.

On the contrary, using the image in the EVF for judging the actual exposure of the photo as saved in the raw can be quite misleading.

Some may suggest using the histogram, but that’s also based on that same interpretation that the EVF gives of the actual content that will be stored in the raw file.

And again, they are all 8 bit previews, while the raw files usually save 12 or 14 bits of data.

This means that no, the EVF is not showing you “exactly what your picture will be”.

Knowing that, it’s easy to understand how exposing using well the light meter in a dslr can potentially give more accurate results. 

The D700 has a 1050 pixel RGB light meter sensor with a 14-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC): it measures the color and brightness in different parts of the frame, and uses that information to intelligently determine exposure. It can also communicate with compatible lenses to determine subject distance (hence the “3D” in Nikon’s “3D Color Matrix Metering II” system name), which helps it make even more intelligent decisions about exposure and flash.

The D850 has a 180.000 pixel RGB light meter sensor and it offers much better accuracy.

So, the light meter is working by analyzing the actual scene and it’s calibrated to make the rendition of the scene an average of 18% gray. Different light meter modes offer different results, which can be more or less accurate.

Now, in a dslr we have the advantage of getting info about the correct exposure, while seeing reality as it is, with no lag. In the mirrorless, we see an 8 bit interpretation and we have lag (to some degree).

I am not bashing the mirrorless and its EVF. What I am saying is that camera brands marketing departments work really hard to convince us that the EVF is better. It is not necessarily better. In some cases it can be worse than an optical viewfinder.

I believe that a photographer proficient with using the light meter in a dslr can get better exposures with a dslr than a photographer using a mirrorless and relying completely on what’s shown in an EVF.

The interpretation given by the EVF is also depending on the color profile we are using. For instance, when I shoot with the Pen-F I usually have the Color Profile 2 set and a slight S-curve. What I see in the EVF is not what is being saved in the raw file, because I am seeing a preview that crushes white and blacks. If I were to follow what I see in the EVF, I would needlessly underexpose the photo.

In the end it is a matter of habits and taste. What I wanted to say is that the EVF is not necessarily better than the OVF, both have their strengths, and depending on how we want to shoot the OVF may give better results, if we put the skills in.

Conclusion.

In an historic moment when economy is worsening and many struggle, it’s difficult for me to recommend buying something, even something apparently cheap as a Nikon D700.

This camera has no magic colors and won’t change your photography. YouTubers love hyperboles. Please take their statements for what they are: content for algorithms.

The D700 is an extremely good and capable camera from the past and it is now available for relatively few money. It has a professional, durable body, and it has everything a photographer may need for creating photography. It’s not offering sophisticated automations, and using it requires some thinking, which is in my opinion a very good thing.

As I wrote before, choosing the D700 means spending a relatively small amount of money that can get you a professional camera and some very good lenses, enough for learning photography, for doing serious photography, and for having lots of fun.

Is it enough for working? Yes it is, unless your job has some special requirements.

Is it a good choice as everyday camera and is it better than a smartphone? Absolutely, if its size and weight don’t bother you.

Is it a good companion if you already have better cameras? Yes it is, if you want what it offers: smaller files, a body you don’t have to babysit, and the requirement to be more in the moment when shooting.

Let’s spend a moment talking about that “being in the moment”. This is another evergreen in YouTube videos. It’s usually employed when the reviewer is talking of Leica cameras, as a reason for justifying the existence of the M and its price.

I find this argument is a bit overestimated: we can “slow down” with every camera, if we have the will and the discipline.

With the D700, being in the moment means understanding that we are using an optical viewfinder, and we must pay attention to which metering mode we selected, for instance. On a modern mirrorless we can see a preview of the exposure and we have more dynamic range on the sensor, so we can try to shoot by feel and hope to fix it in post. Not with the D700: in this case we must pay attention to the exposure triangle (shutter speed, aperture, ISO), use the proper metering mode, and put some skill in focusing. It’s all basic stuff and it’s definitely rewarding.

Is this better? Is it worse? It depends. I think it adds a layer of experience to the activity of taking pictures, and I do enjoy it. At the same time, it’s not uncommon I got back with photos that were exposed in a less than ideal way, or with focus slightly misplaced. I did’t make a drama out of it, and I took it as a reason for being more careful.

Our attention is constantly shortened and stolen by smartphones, social media, news and so on. I think using an instrument that requires us to pay attention is good for our brain first, and then of course also for our understanding of photography.

I really enjoy using the D700 and it’s doing good to me as a photographer. In most ways it’s the antithesis of the Ricoh GR II, and I enjoy experimenting and changing.

Its weight doesn’t bother me and I love to take it with me and use it for capturing what happens around me. It’s fun to use and it produces photos I love, what else can I ask for? And it makes me pay attention, which is tremendously important. 

It helps me being less a consumer and more a creator, which is what I want to be.

PS: why did the D700 become my every day camera, taking for the moment the place of the Pen-F? This will be the topic of a future post.

PS: the photos in this article all come from bigger sets that I will publish in next posts. For this one I wanted to offer a wide view on what I recently shot with the D700.