D600 Impressions (from a D300 user)

Was at my camera store today and couldn't resist picking up the D600.

Image quality is just wow. I have no words. ISO 3200 looks like ISO 400-640 on my D300 (but better), and I can max out the shadow recovery sliders in NX2 with zero increase in noise, even at 3200.

One thing really surprising me is the white balance, I can barely fool it if I try, even under mixed lighting (2-3 sources). It is much better than my D300 in this regard, and I will be correcting the WB on far fewer photos I suspect.

Camera feels more solid than a D7000, and the controls are all very tight. D300/D800 feels a little better ergonomic-wise though, especially if you have big hands like I do. D600 still is extremely comfortable, don't get me wrong there.

Love the shutter sound, it's a nice quiet "thwack" - noticeably more quiet than D300.

You can assign the Fn button to swap between FX and DX which is cool.

As for the autofocus, I could not fool it, even at F1.8 in crappy lighting with an outer AF point on a subject with essentially zero contrast on it. Didn't matter if I shot at an angle or head on, it nailed it. AF is very fast, as least as quick as my D300 and seems a little more sensitive. I'll get a better idea of AF when I throw my 70-200VR2 on it later on today, but my expectations are a notch above D300 in speed and sensitivity.

I got used to the different control layout in less than 1 minute, and don't even have to look at any buttons (coming from D300).

Viewfinder is gorgeous, no surprises there.

All 14 bit lossless compressed RAW files are 29-31 MB. I bought 2 8 GB 90MB/s cards, good for about 550 photos combined.

I'll add more as it comes, feel free to ask me questions. I am not much into video, so I haven't tried any of that yet.