Eight years after Nikon’s D1 camera changed professional digital photography forever, Nikon today introduced the D3 – a new digital SLR camera that is poised to once again revolutionize photography for professionals. The 12.1 effective megapixel D3 features Nikon’s new FX-format CMOS sensor, measuring 23.9 x 36mm, which is nearly identical to the size of 35mm film. With the fastest startup time, shortest viewfinder blackout time, and shortest shutter lag of any digital SLR camera as well as the capability to shoot up to nine frames per second at full FX-format resolution, the D3 is the world’s fastest digital SLR camera in its class.

The Italian group HAL9000 that specializes in art restorationa and preservation has used a Nikon D2X to create an ultra-high resolution composite of an Italian fresco. The 9.85 Gigapixel final photo, which is viewable online at full resolution, represents the ceiling of a church in Rome. This is a stunning example of the use of stitching to create photos with incredible detail.

 Some technical data:

• A total of 1188 frames
• Lens: Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED AF VR used @ 400mm for all frames)
• Clauss Rodeon VR Head
• The camera was set to NEF+JPEG; the NEFs were processed to 16-bit TIFFs through Capture NX.
• Final image: 149,307 pixels x 65,984 pixels.
• Processing on a four AMD Opteron 885 dual core processors computer with 16GB of RAM.