The Nikon D7000 is a powerful SLR that takes great pictures and has plenty of features, but it is also rather expensive. The new SLR boasts a feature set worthy of the high price, though, capturing 16.9 megapixel images to dual SD card slots, shooting high definition video and boasting one of the widest sets of manual control features that we have seen on an SLR.

The D7000 is not a small camera: at 24.3 ounces for the body without a lens, it gets heavy if you are trying to hold it for an extended period, so a tripod or monopod is a sound investment. It fits in the hand well, though, with the index finger fdalling naturally onto the shutter and front control dial, and the thumb falling onto the back control dial. Manual shooters will welcome this approach, as it puts aperture and shutter speed controls within easy reach.

Performance (read in-depth performance coverage at DigitalCameraInfo.com)

We found that the D7000 performed well overall in our tests, getting high scores for color accuracy, noise, low light shooting and dynamic range. The only test that it struggled with was resolution, where we found that the images it captured were not as sharp as cameras such as the Canon 60D or 7D. The D7000 does provide the ability to tweak the sharpness to some degree though, so it is possible to acheive sharper results out of the camera with some experimentation. Part of this softness is also due to the kit lens that we tested it with, which produced somewhat soft images with the aperture stopped down. If you are buying a D7000 and have the budget, you may be better served by buying the body only and investing in better quality lenses.

We also found very low noise at lower ISO settings, although the noise did rise to noticeable levels at ISO levels of 3200 and above. At the maximum of 25600, this noise was drowning out much of the shadow detail in the images. The noise reduction did do something to ameliorate this, but the details of images were still lost, so the higher ISO settings should be avoided unless there really is no other option. It is good to have them available, though.

We also found that the video that the D7000 captured looked good, although it was not as sharp as that captured by cameras like the Canon 60D or the 7D. The D7000 does offer a lot of manual controls, though, providing the user with a lot of control over how the captured video will look. One thing that the D7000 cannot do is to capture HD video at the 30 frames per second that many camcorders can shoot at: it is limited to shooting 24 frames a second at the highest 1920 by 1080 resolution. 30fps video can be shot at lower resolutions, though.

There are a number of strong competitors for this product, with Canon offering the 60D and 7D. The 60D is slightly cheaper at $1099 for the body only (The D7000 costs $1199 for the body only) and shoots higher resolution images. We also found that the 60D images were a little sharper, but the Nikon had lower noise in images. The main competition from Sony comes from the SLT-A55V camcorder, which can shoot considerably faster (10fps agains the 6fps of the Nikon) and is quite a lot cheaper at $849 for the body and kit lens. The Nikon has the much wider selection of lenses that can be used with their SLRs, though.