The water-, dust- and shock-resistant D3X is built to take some pounding.

In this desperate age of layoffs, shrinking 401Ks, and frozen spending, it's very hard to justify a camera that costs about a sixth of what most American households earn in a year. Yet here comes Nikon with its latest flagship digital SLR, the $8,000 D3X, a camera which has been pilloried by some critics as too expensive, too extravagant, and too similar to what's already on the market to justify the pre-Recession price tag.

Quite a few blogs and Internet camera review sites completely wrote off the D3X when it was announced late last year before they even had a chance to take one picture with the camera. Now that's a fine how-do-you-do!

Though pre-judging anything is dangerous, I could see the point of some of these bloggers. Charging $8,000 for a camera that only takes photos in this economy requires some guts. (Hey, even Nikon's prosumer-level D90 also shoots high-def video. What's up with that?)

Prior to the anti-D3X backlash, Nikon had been on a roll, with one camera release after another causing photographers to swoon with anticipation. Then along came this D3X with its gaudy price tag and its similarity to the far cheaper Sony A900 ($3,000, reviewed in PDN last month) and some of these "fanboys" quickly turned their backs on Nikon, with one well-circulated video on YouTube equating the company's move to the decline of the Third Reich.

Of course, had this 24.5-megapixel full-frame DSLR come out just a couple years ago we would not even be having this discussion. Back in the summer of 2007, Canon released its 21.1-megapixel 1Ds Mark III and few studio photographers barely batted an eye at that camera's $8,000 price tag. Some even rejoiced that they now had a viable alternative to pricey medium-format cameras. If you stacked the 1Ds Mark III against a $35,000 Hasselblad or Leaf, the Canon looked a relative steal.

Times change, though and the D3X does seem dreadfully expensive now. That is why it pains me to say that this is an incredible camera which you're really going to want to get your hands on, despite the high price. Though I can't say whether it's worth every penny—it all depends really on what sort of work you do and how much of a fiscal hole you're in right now—I can say that images I captured with the D3X both in the studio and out in the field during a month of testing are some of the best I've seen out of any camera, even when stacked up against medium-format models.

Hold on to your wallets ladies and gentlemen, Nikon may have figured out a way to make you want to part with more of your hard earned—and increasingly scarce—cash. With the D3X, it begins and ends with delicious image quality.


WORKHORSE

Holding the D3X side-by-side with Sony A900—the camera to which it's most often compared—gives you the first hint at where that $5,000 differential between the two DSLRs lies. The D3X is a serious workhorse, weighing (body only) 43 ounces with a tough magnesium alloy and rubberized body that's water-, dust-, and shock- resistant. If you've shot with the Nikon D3, the rugged chassis and recognizable layout of buttons and dials on the D3X will be very familiar.

The Sony A900, on the other hand, is well designed but feels slight in comparison. Pick the two up side by side and you'll notice the difference. While there are some who may like the lighter, slightly hollowed-out feel of the A900 (33 ounces), I felt more comfortable with the solidly built D3X. Though this is hardly the only difference between the Nikon and Sony models it's the most glaring one which may, in part, explain the glaring price differential between the cameras.

Other "luxury" extras on the D3X include a self-diagnostic shutter that's tested to over 300,000 cycles and a powerful Lithium ion battery that will give you up to 4400 shots on a single charge. I also like that Nikon's DSLRs are still the only ones that have dual CompactFlash slots which is an essential feature for a camera that captures images at such high resolution. (While Canon offers dual CF and SD card slots on its cameras and Sony has CF and Memory Stick slots, I still don't understand why those companies haven't gone with the CF combo, which is preferred by pros.)

Otherwise, both the Sony A900 and Canon 5D Mark II (also reviewed in the last issue of PDN) have similar features to the D3X which like those two cameras sports a nice 3-inch LCD with 307,200 pixels (920,000-dot) of resolution and a 170 degree viewing angle.

Though the benefits of that screen can be seen while using one of the two Live View modes on the D3X—a handheld mode which employs phase detection and a tripod mode which uses contrast detection to focus—it would've been nice to use it to showcase an HD movie mode, a feature which both the D3X and the A900 lack.

If you want to show your images off on something other than the 3-inch LCD or a computer monitor, the camera has an HDMI port so you can plug a cable directly to your studio's HDTV (if you have one) to share with a client. Again this is nothing new among recent DSLRs but the D3X's hopped-up resolution looks great on an HDTV.


FAST FRAMER

Though most of the buzz (and backlash) about the D3X has been about the camera's emphasis on resolution over bells and whistles, what continues to impress me about Nikon's recent lineup of DLSRs is the reliable overall speed. This is the sort of tech spec you don't notice until there's a problem and even when shooting in RAW + Fine JPEG mode (which is de rigueur for me during testing) I never felt like I had to wait for the D3X which was not exactly the case with the 21.1-megapixel Canon 1Ds Mark III ( reviewed in PDN's January '08 issue).

In Continuous Shooting on the D3X I achieved the advertised five frames per second speed even in RAW (12-bit NEF) + Fine JPEG mode with the camera's buffer filling at about 20 shots. (In 14-bit RAW + Fine JPEG mode though, it slowed dramatically to about one frame per second while maintaining the 20 shot buffer.)

In comparison to the 1Ds Mark III which has a slightly lower resolution, the D3X was a step up in speed. During testing of the 1Ds Mark III, that camera's buffer would fill at about 10-15 shots. With both the D3X and the 1Ds Mark III, we used the fastest 16-gb UDMA cards on the market from SanDisk (Extreme IV) and Lexar (300x); these types of CF cards are highly recommended if you decide to purchase a high-resolution DSLR. UDMA cards when used with compatible cameras—most pro DSLRs these days are UDMA friendly—will speed both the write time from camera buffer to memory card and the read time from card reader to your computer.