D700 vs D300

What lenses do you have now, and what lenses would you be contemplating, should you switch to the larger format?

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't see the small print on the tail of your post, above. But it actually still matters ... because even though you have all FX-friendly lenses, you're still looking at very different behavior.

Once you start talking about wildlife and especially birds, I would get the D300 or better yet, the D300S with video capability. You need reach for wildlife.

The Nikon D700 has the same sensor that Nikon D3. There is capacity for high isos. So my recommendation is the D700

wildlife? DX. every time. Makes all your lenses longer than FX. What lenses do you have?

I'm in a similar dilemma, wanting to replace my D200. I also shoot landscapes and would buy a 16-35mm to replace my 12-24mm DX lens on the D700. Big bucks. What I really need is one of each, a D300 and a D700. But it gets worse because I figure both those models could be getting replaced w/in the year. So I'm going to wait and see, and save my $$$ in the meantime.

"the improved image quality that I get from having a full frame sensor"

I think a lot of people would beg to differ...

I would also recommend the D300s. The D700 will not offer the zoom performance. The D300 can shoot very clean images at ISO 1600, and even ISO 3200 is superb. The D700 is already nearly two years old and will most likely be replaced this year with the same technology that went into the D3s.

So the real question is aside from the many features/benefits the D700 has over the D300, is a 6mp cropped D700 image as good as a 12mp D300 image. I tested the D300 full frame image to a cropped D3 image under numerous shooting conditions and found virtually no difference. Here is one series of test shots I did at ISO 3200 which includes the full frame and an extensive crops made for comparison. The D3 crop is on the bottom:

http://photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=859843#

(original shot, ISO 3200, 80-400mm @400mm, f8, 1/125, SB-800)

If money is not an issue, I would recommend you go with the D700.

"...a 6mp cropped D700 image as good as a 12mp D300 image..."

Elliot, those claims might be credible if you'd back them up with unaltered original photos with EXIF data intact. It's impossible to verify your claims based on those composite images.

A thorough description of your resampling process would also help so that others could attempt to duplicate your results and judge for themselves whether these claims are credible.

You could attach full resolution, unaltered files to a discussion forum thread or host them off-site, since unfortunately photo.net portfolio spaces do not accommodate maximum resolution JPEGs (the limit is something like 1500 pixels in either dimension or 3 MB).