Nikon D7000 Samples

Here, the Nikon D7000 is compared to the Pentax K-5
Pentax K-5 which most likely shares the same image sensor. All images below are 100% unmodified crops from their respective cameras. Both cameras were set to F/8 in aperture-priority mode with fixed ISO and custom white-balance. As usual, the cameras were calibrated to give the highest quality and most realistic results possible. The Nikkor AF-S DX 18-105mm F/3.5-5.6G ED VR
Nikkor AF-S DX 18-105mm F/3.5-5.6G ED VR was used on the Nikon D7000 while the Pentax K-5 used the Pentax DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL (IF) SDM
Pentax DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL (IF) SDM.

These crops help determine which ISO settings can be acceptably used on these cameras. As image noise increases, most cameras compensate with noise reduction which introduces softness. The point at which a print become unacceptably noisy is a matter of personal taste.

Nikon D7000	Pentax K-5
	ISO 80
ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 200	ISO 200
ISO 400	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 800
ISO 1600	ISO 1600
ISO 3200	ISO 3200
ISO 6400	ISO 6400
ISO 12800	ISO 12800
ISO 25600	ISO 25600
While the sensors are the same, the D7000 uses more noise-reduction by default making its low-ISO results look smoother and its high-ISO results look softer until ISO 6400. The ISO 12800 and 25600 are truly head-scratching. It looks like the D7000 suddenly got a lot sharper at those results. Triple-checking, these are in fact the D7000's output using the exact same settings as the rest of the series. We can also guess that the noise is causing an optical illusion giving images an appearance of sharpness or the camera gave up on noise-reduction at that point. As per our methodology, each shot is taken 9 times and they were consistent.	ISO 51200