This is a topic that I hope to cover in greater detail several weeks from now after I complete some more shooting and some travels, but as a D300 and D700 owner, I of course have done some initial comparisons (I'm somewhat new to the D700, and only have put a few thousand frames on it so far, mostly in the studio)
Some early thoughts:
1) Strictly speaking, in terms of detail, if you shoot both cameras at base ISO, no, there will be no advantage to an uncropped frame from one or the other in terms of detail.
2) The quicker you move away (as in, up the ISO scale) from base ISO, the more the D700 quickly pulls away and takes the lead. This is
significant as an advantage to the D700. So most of the rest of this discussion will concern both bodies at low (base) ISO - the D700 most conclusively wins the battle of the moderate/high to high ISO's and it's not close. Just so we're clear
3) At base ISO, on my preliminary outdoor tests, there is very, very little difference at least on my one test scene, between the D300 and D700. No grand image quality difference, no magic, no mythical qualities became evident - both images were so close that I'd lay cash down that 99.999% of the folks on these forums could never tell which image came from which camera
4) At base ISO, in my studio comparisons, there is more difference between the two bodies than in my outdoor test but the differences again were not dramatic in nature. The D700's greatest advantage was slightly cleaner shadows and continuous toned things like studio backdrops - this was a noticeable, if slight difference. More subtly, I felt the D700 had slightly better tonal transitions throughout the skin tone range and slightly better highlight control, but again, these are small differences - in magnitude they are less than the difference between going from a good to an excellent lens. No dramatic magic, no mythical stupendous blow your socks off image quality advantage here once again - both bodies were close, although I do give a slight edge to the D700 in subtle ways.
5) All this being said, the base ISO D700 files are much more malleable in post process. If you miss exposure a bit and need to bring it up, the D700 file will take it better. You simply can "abuse" the D700 files more than the D300 files; the D300 really needs to be shot spot on to deliver it's best quality and it does take a bit of tweaking - custom curve based picture control, careful sharpening setting, careful exposure. This may very well make a huge difference to some folks and dramatically push them to a D700.
6) Agree about the D700 being "gentler" on lenses once you get past corner/edge sharpness performance issues. The D300, due to it's pixel density, seems to show greater differences between lenses in the center zone than the D700. Truly excellent lenses are needed to shine on the D300, while on the D700 a lens that is decent in the corners (not all are) will "behave" better.
7) My thoughts on the human eye and 6mp and that bit: Disagree. When I went from D70/D100 class to my D2X, the difference in resolution wasn't so much in detail, which was improved, but rather,
definite improvements in tonality - simply more bits to work with. Amd it's visible easily on an 8x10" print.
8) D700 is a truly joyous camera to
work with - it's bigger/brighter viewfinder, faster initial AF acquisition versus D300 and slightly less lag time (particularly in the 14 bit raw mode a D300 slows down a bit in, which is needed for best quality) make it simply a better camera than the D300 if the ability of the camera to be an extension of your vision is important. This may - or may not - allow you to get the shot better if you're in a situation where you need to process what you see and react. In a landscape situation - this may not be relevant at all - but as a studio shooter who shoots a lot of imrov and free-form movement, it's
huge - being able to see better, and react better, makes for better shots - irrespective of whether the image quality is the same, worse, or better. Don't discount this. It is in this regard that I now understand the popularity of the D700 with it's owners - it's a very, very flexible camera that can do almost anything asked of it - it can shoot in any light, is fast, and produces really gorgeous, film-like files. There may be cameras that produce more edgier/snappier files that might be a bit more "digital like", but between it's ergonomics and image quality, I definitely see why the D700 is so popular.
9) But this myth that at base ISO the D700 totally smokes the D300 is, so far, to my eyes, not true. In the studio there are some advantages to the D700 file that I like better, and they are visible, but the magnitude of this difference aren't as dramatic as some people make it out to be. As for outdoor scenes, in the next few weeks I hope to put the bodies through some conditions where I can see if I see any subtle/moderate/dramatic advantages to the D700 at base ISO - my first initial tests didn't show it on the outdoor scene, which so far put's me into Romans camp of saying that for a landscape shooter getting better glass, tripod/ballhead, training, or simply spending the money to go to locations to shoot instead of to collect gear and never use it anywhere cool, make more sense than automatically going FX just because it's trendy and a bunch of folks in the forums do it. Remember that magazine pro Bob Krist shoots DX and I bet he can outshoot most of us stone cold.
Sorry for the amount of text - and hopefully in a month or so I'll have more to say once I shoot the D700 some more outside, which I've not done as much as I'd like so far.
-m
