Every two years, the photokina gives us the opportunity to discover new photo equipments and technologies. This is also the occasion for the brands to reveal their new offers. This year Nikon introduced the D600 and Canon the EOS 6D, two entry level FX bodies.
With the recent release of the Nikon D800/800E, D4 and the Canon EOS 5D MK3, and the EOS 1DX, I found interesting to have a look at the famous DXO mark test results for those new DSLR and the previous ones. Note that the Canon EOS 6d and the 1DX have not yet been tested, I'll update this article as soon it will be done.
On the Nikon side, the Nikon D600 shows excellent results for its class, placed just behind the D800 and D800e in terms of image quality:
The D600 does even better than the D800 in low-light condition. Despite the price difference, we can say that those three bodies offer the pretty same (excellent) performances. They do better than the recent Nikon D4 and the old Nikon D3S and D700:
The D3S still is the king in high ISO conditions, but both the D3S and the D700 are exceeded (without being bad at all!) by the new generation for color-depth and dynamic range.
It is interesting to notice the also good performances of DX bodies like the Nikon D3200 and D7000:
Except for low-light ISO, they offer equal to better performances than the D3s and D700.
On these comparison points, the Canon 5D Mk3 and Mk2 seems to be noticeably behind old and new Nikon products of the similar generations, but we shall wait for the 1Dx and 6D results to be fair:
Conclusion
For the studied aspects, I think we have two winners for two different class budgets: the Nikon D600 offers really excellent performances for a reasonable price compared to D800/D800e or D4 bodies. It is available at 2099$.
On its side, the Nikon D700 represents a really great opportunity for the occasion market, its performances are still really great and used D700 can be found at around 1500$, more or less.
