gdgt

An unsurprisingly great camera that's worth every penny of its higher price for its target market of professional nonsports photographers, the Nikon D800 should definitely please those who've been waiting patiently to replace their older Nikon equipment.

It's a better still camera than the D700, it adds video, and the fantastic image sensor takes images to a new level of quality. The high-resolution sensor was a gutsy move, and it paid off, as Nikon proved that you can pack pixels into a camera without ruining its performance in the dark.

The D800 is a camera that consistently delivers high quality results, under a wide range of shooting conditions with a minimum of fuss. There's not much more you can ask for in a photographic tool than that.

A week was all the time it took for us to fall in love with the D800. And we were starting to get butterflies when we first took it out of the box. This is the camera we'd get if money were no object. ... The resolution of the D800 is its main selling point, and it really is a game-changer.

The Nikon D800 provides excellent image and video quality, with enough resolution to satisfy any pixelpeeper. Aside from an ergonomic design, it also has an intuitive button layout which makes for a pleasant shooting experience.

The Nikon D800 is a beast of a camera, an extraordinarily high-resolution anachronism dropped into a supposedly post-megapixel world. The 36.3-megapixel sensor of the D800 defines it; it is the camera’s greatest asset, making it one of the most flexible, enjoyable cameras we’ve ever shot with.

Promising extremely high-resolution images, the Nikon D800 doesn't disappoint; better yet, its high-ISO performance surprised us, able to produce a good 8 x 10-inch print even at ISO 25,600. Well-designed and built, the Nikon D800 is a premium performer that easily earns its selling price.

The bottom line? Until we know what Canon has up its sleeve, Nikon has what's arguably the most exciting DSLR around and one which represents a fantastic upgrade-path for D700, D300(s) and D7000 owners alike who really value resolution; indeed even D3x owners may be tempted.

It's clear that the D800 is an excellent and very capable camera. The metering, white balance and autofocus systems all deliver the goods and the image quality is superb at the lower sensitivity settings.

For now though, the D800 offers all the future proofing a photo enthusiast could conceivably need, if they can justify stumping up the cash and telling themselves that yes, they do really, truly need all those pixels.

Don’t expect spectacular results without tweaking, and noise at high ISOs is definitely an issue. In the end, however, your photos will be worth the effort.