I know the feeling. You carried your camera around all day and right when you need it the most, it just doesn’t deliver. Life doesn’t wait for perfect lighting, and some of the most dynamic and beautiful moments happen under dim lighting conditions. I have had to grope with these conditions mostly while doing concert photography, and I know the incredible frustration of rushing home from an amazing show, bursting to see the shots you got only to find murky and muddled images appear on your computer screen. I also know that as far as most security is concerned, a big flash tags you as a professional, which requires all sorts of special permissions and passes. And forget about plays and recitals where a flash elicits all kinds of raised eyebrows and judgmental throat clearing. So that leaves us with available light, and what can feel like literally taking shots in the dark.

Why are concerts and shows so hard to capture sharply? The culprit is NOISE. Not the noise from the twenty-minute drum solo that’s been blowing your mind, but digital, visual noise. Bad noise. Noise is the result of your digital camera’s sensor being turned up too high for its own good. As available light drops, the camera’s sensor needs to increase its sensitivity, or ISO in order to capture the scene, and as sensitivity increases, so does distortion. This is called “gain”, and although musicians may use this same principle to create that familiar guitar distortion, grittiness is generally avoided in image making. The trick is having a camera that can shoot at an ISO high enough to capture a dimly lit scene with minimal noise. Nikon’s newly released D700 is a shrunken version of their flagship Full Frame D3 released this August, and for a full $2000 cheaper and a smaller but just as sturdy build, it is head and shoulders above its competitors, especially in low-light performance.

What’s in a Full Frame? The D700 sports the same 12.1 MP Full Frame sensor as Nikon’s Professional level D3, meaning that the image sensor is the same size as a frame in a 35 mm film camera. Other digital SLR’s use a smaller sensor that actually crops the image gathered by the lens by 1.5 times. That means that when shooting with a 50 mm lens for example, much of the image is missing the sensor, and the lens is acting more like an 85 mm. This also means that mega pixel for mega pixel, Full Frame sensors allow more room and don’t cram the pixels together into a smaller space. The same amount of pixels crammed into a smaller space results in you guessed it, more noise.

When we compare the small format Nikon D300 vs, the Full Frame Nikon D700, we see that although the D300 actually has 12.3 megapixels versus 12.1 in the D700, the extra breathing room of the bigger sensor lets the pixels in the D700 gather higher quality information, resulting in less distortion. Amongst Full Frame models like the 5D, the lower megapixels in the D700, (12.8 vs. 12.1), plus a more sensible use of noise reduction software in the camera results in a noticeable difference, especially at high ISOs.