The lens delivers superb quality, and while there’s inevitably geometric distortion at 14mm, the image is sharp across the entire frame. The D700 is set 1EV below its base sensitivity here, so you have to be careful with exposures, but the result is clean and detailed.

The very low angle was made easier with Live View, although a flip-out screen would ultimately have been preferred here.

The crops are again impressively sharp – the first is taken from the extreme left side of the image, proving the lens delivers decent performance across the frame. The D700 at 200 ISO is also delivering a very clean, detailed image.

The D700 had no problems keeping the subject in sharp focus.

The D700 was also not fooled into underexposing by the bright hull, and the crops reveal superb quality.

There’s a great deal of detail in those crops and very natural-looking image processing.

As you’d expect from the base sensitivity, the quality is very high, with detailed crops free from artefacts. The D700 has also done a good job of balancing natural light with that from the flash.

A smaller depth of field could of course be achieved in Aperture Priority, especially with this lens.

The AF 50mm f1.8 is certainly no macro lens, but has still delivered a good result at its closest focusing distance.

There’s also no compromise with the D700 increased to 400 ISO. The crops are very smooth, detailed and noise-free, although some may prefer to apply a little extra sharpening.

Low light forced Program to select too large an aperture for the desired depth-of-field, so we switched to Aperture Priority and f4.

As you’d hope for a full-frame sensor just 1EV above its base sensitivity, the crops remain clean and detailed. It’s a very usable sensitivity on the D700.

As above the D700 wanted to use the maximum aperture in Program mode, so we switched to f3.5 in Aperture Priority to achieve a slightly greater depth-of-field.

We’re now beginning to see the real high ISO benefits of full-frame with another detailed, noise-free result that’s very usable.

The crops are now revealing some texture through noise and noise reduction, but there’s still plenty of detail and the result looks good when printed.

To see how this same scene looks throughout the D700’s entire sensitivity range, check out our D700 High ISO results page. As a taster though we’ll include one final shot at the D700’s maximum sensitivity.

As seen here, there’s lots of noise, and also numerous red ‘hot’ pixels in shadow areas. So it’s only really for emergency use, but at least the option’s there.

Note: the contrast between the dark ceiling and bright lamp has resulted in a visible line across the image. This is sensor blooming, not banding, and was only visible in our tests at the highest ISO and in compositions with very high contrast areas.