New Nikon EXPEED image processor

Nikon has announced the new Nikon D3 and Nikon D300. Both are very much similar in exception to course to the full frame sensor of the Nikon D3, a 12 MP CMOS sensor with a pixel pitch of 8.45µm! Both cameras now utilize Nikon’s new 16 bit image processor called EXPEED. It has some very interesting features, such as real time chromatic aberration correction and Active D-Lighting. For those of you who are not familiar with the D-Lighting technology, D-lighting can “light” the dark parts of the image by using a filter. This way the system will lighten pixels in depends to where the pixel is in the image. Also interesting to note is the new “Picture Control”, a unified color system for all Nikon Cameras. There are Standard, Neutral, Vivid and Monochrome Picture Control settings. Each can be tuned by the user and could be transferred to other cameras. This still not means Nikon uses color LUT that could be uploaded to the cameras as Canon does (And all of this is worthless if you use non Nikon of Canon Raw software). Nikon claims EXPEED is capable to produce the same image quality as Nikon Capture NX, which normally does produce excellent image quality – far better than the Camera. We’ll have to test EXPEED to see if it is true.