Like many folks, I pre-ordered the D800 the same day it was available. Alas, Nikon totally blew the market analysis vs production vs. supply chain formula. After waiting 2 months, I had to leave the country before Nikon got it's D800 act together. I needed a beat-up D90 replacement camera, and the D3200 seemed like a decent place-holder. I quickly ordered one before they were back-ordered too! Sure, the D3200 is DX, not FX. Sure, it is not nearly as flexible. Sure, it can only AF with newer lenses. BUT, you can buy about 4-D3200's for the price of a D800, AND it comes with a decent kit lens for $699!The tutoring graphical-based menu system is geared more to beginners, which I am not, so I find it maddening. Most will love it, since it is somewhat educational, and offers a great variety of pre-sets to take creative shots easily.
It is amazingly light weight lighter than most lenses! It is very quiet. The AF could be faster, but it's plenty fast enough. When you dig deeper, you shockingly find that the D3200 has many advanced internal features from the highest-end cameras (D800 & F4). The high-res LCD rear screen, the EXPEED 3 image processing engine, and a new 24MP sensor. The EXPEED 3 image processing engine allows the D3200 to perform at an altitude unheard of for a so-called entry level camera. Nikon's Active-D dynamic range enhancement at 24MP at 4 frames per second requires substantial in-camera processing power.
I bought this camera primarily for still photography. With the proper lenses & technique, the results are stunning. Low-light/high ISO performance is far beyond what you should expect at this level camera. Candle-lit face images are noise-free, and look great. Still life's on a tripod at ISO 100, have more resolution that ANY DSLR I have ever used, with very little shadow noise. In short, I might not accept my D800 when it becomes available. I might use the D3200 longer than I thought, (waiting for the 24MP FX D600 for $1999 later this year -my guesses on price & stats & date)...or, just keep using the D3200. If it breaks (I'm hard on cameras), I'll just buy a new one.
Bottom line -the D3200: super light-weight, very quiet, super high resolution (& low noise, high dynamic range, superb colors), incredible HD video with slow motion. It is no doubt THE most amazing DSLR value on the planet!
5/14/12 UPDATE: I've now shot 100s of images, using lenses from 11 mm to 600 mm. I've learned a lot. Super-high resolution cameras are a new arena for most of us. On the surface, one automatically thinks you will get images with twice the resolution (12MP vs 24MP). Not so. MP resolution is measured linearly, so the increase while significant, is less than doubled. More importantly, when you enter the hi-res camera stratosphere, photographic technique & lens choice are critical. While these high MP cameras are capable of amazing results, you have to work to get absolutely ALL the MP's this camera has to offer. Do not blame the camera if your initial results are less dramatically sharper than your old 6-8-12MP Nikon. It's probably you...
BTW, the Nikon 18-55mm is a decent lens, but it doesn't do this imager justice. You can get better results, with better glass. The excellent f1.8 35mm DX Nikon on this camera makes a super-light weight compact package you can carry all day long, producing super images. A 60 year-old Nikkor Q 200mm f4, $70 or so on eBay, produces stunning results if carefully used on Manual, on a tripod.
Set-up a table with clean background and a few artifacts on it. Use the sharpest lens you have, at f 8, on a sturdy tripod, perpendicular to the table, Shoot the scene with the in-camera flash on both old & new camera bodies. You will see the difference easily when images from both cameras are compared side by side, enlarged to 100%.
How does this translate to everyday casual shooting? Not easily. Sub-par technique still results in sub-par images no matter what camera is used. If you are a beginner looking for the best entry-level DSLR ever made, all of this won't matter -grab a D3200 and shoot away! Just note that the D3200 is capable of world-class imagery. If it takes more effort to take photographs of this caliber, it's a good thing -the D3200 forces you to up your game to get there!
5/5/13 UPDATE. It's been a year. I have a D800 and a D3200. Yes, there are many differences between the two. One is at the high end of the spectrum, the other, entry level. When I'm shooting commercially, or seriously in any way, it's the D800. It is a superb camera, if you own glass that can fully exploit the 36MP sensor, and your technique is solid. For everything else, I use the D3200. Why? It's light and compact. You can easily carry it around all day, with the f1.8 35mm, and hardly know it's there. If that lens isn't wide enough, shoot a 3-frame series and stitch them together in Photoshop. Again, with good glass and technique, the results are very, very good. D800 territory? No, but few would notice. The D3200 is a pleasure to use, and handles fast enough for most kinds of photography. You can use old manual Nikkor lenses easily, albeit with a bit more effort. With the focus confirmation dot in the viewfinder, manual focusing is easy. Exposure can be guessed and adjusted using the great hi-res LCD. I recently had to shoot an emergency-rush job covering a politician's speech. All I had in the car was the D3200, the 35mm f1.8, and an old, sharp 100mm f2.8 E Nikkor -my normal in-car-at all-times stash. The setting was indoors, in a bright garden area -no flash allowed. I was surrounded by folks with Nikon D4's and $1500 lenses. I got a few looks....LOL. I boosted the ISO to 1600, used the $50 100mm @ f4 @1/125th, and the results were great, published in several places. The D3200 is a great camera for the money, I like it more now than when I first bought it!
My first outing after the camera arrived was to some birdpark with absolutely no prior preparation. The manual is still in the box, only charged the battery overnight and brought a selection of lenses in addition to the kit lens.
First surprise, even the kit "plastic" lens performs really nicely on this camera. Due to the nature of the objects of interest, the remaining shoots were done on a 28-300mm.
I was accompanied by an experienced bird photographer and we took turns with the camera. Both made the following observations: From the angle of experienced Nikon users, this camera offers everything in terms of menus and dials to set the camera up the way one is used to from D90, D7000, D300s level cameras. This came as a surprise, as the D3200 does not have the front dial that we both were used to and familiar with. Nikon has done an surprisingly good job in making the menus very easy to access and after a short while, we where entirely concentrated on the shoot and only occasionally reminding ourself that this was "only" an entry-level DSLR.
At the same time, we were impressed how nice the software is tailored to the needs of a potential beginner, gently guiding him towards to goal of making better photos along the way.
The LCD screen on the back is a huge step forward from previous models, as it allowed to effortless pre-screen the shots taken. I was even carrying a laptop computer to better inspect the initial images, but after a short while we only resorted the the built-in screen.
The biggest surprise was however the image quality after we analyzed our initial >350 photos on a large monitor. The yield of usable photos was right out of the box very high, which reiterates the ease of use of this camera and the great auto-focus system (despite only 11 sensors). Also the smallish size of the body turned out to be less problematic, even with a bigger lens attached to it.
We found the image quality obtained to be absolutely stunning, the sharpness of the images was "picture perfect". Colors just the way one would expect them, as is the hall mark of any Nikon camera. Even small birds could be cropped from the 24 MP resulting in usable 7 MP images. Post-processing was a thrill and resulted in a substantial number of images clearly qualifying as publication quality.
Having seen both, the best and the worst in Nikon cameras, I can verify that this entry level DSLR is a keeper. Even though never planned, it will stay in the collection as a second body and now serves as the main camera until the D800 arrives.
If an entry level camera already is this good, what may be expected of the upcoming updates of the other DX models, the likes of D5100, D7000 and the D300s?I only really purchased this as a studio cam. Don't need AF performance for that, nor high ISO's, but do need great resolution. So, with trepidation and reserve, I decided to try this one. I am coming from D700's, D3's, D7k's and other as my point of reference. I shoot for a living.
The good:
Resolution is excellent, especially when coupled with the 40mm macro from Nikon. I have shot a few hundred shots now and am very happy in that regard. The menus are simple enough that you can work them out if you already know Nikon's systems for menus. AF performance is great for this kind of body. Using my 17-55 with it, I could acquire focus only slightly slower that with the D7000. I tried in lower light to see how that worked, and while you could tell it was slower, it was not too bad. Every shot I have taken bar one (black dog in a dark room), was in focus as intended. So, AF is good for this kind of body. I like the layout of the controls too, everything was where it was expected to be.
The bad:
Small body means uncomfortable grip. However, that is what was expected, so I don't really think this is a "bad" for this camera. I expect a person with smaller hands will thoroughly enjoy that aspect. Lenses (all but smaller ones) are front heavy and fell off balance. Pop a 70-200 VR on this and it is silly unless you carry/hold it by the lens primarily. Lastly, there is no AF fine tune, but.... I have not found the need on even one of the lenses I will use it with to make any adjustments, so not too bad a thing.
Conclusion:
Get one if you want it for landscape, low speed portraits (esp families) or for product/architecture. I highly recommend it.I was planning on purchasing a Nikon D7000, but then found out about this camera. Reading on the Nikon Rumors site, it appears that the D7000 may be replaced with a higher MP sensor (24.2 same as the D3200) sometime this fall.
Not wanting to wait, I thought I'd give the D3200 a try. I still had to wait a bit, but finally got one from Amazon for $699 with Prime.
This thing is NOT a toy!! It is a serious piece of camera gear, and if you spend time getting to understand all it can do, it will pay off handsomely with incredible pictures. I would also recommend getting a good Digital Image Management program to get the most out of your pictures (I'm using Adobe LightRoom 3).
Doing some test shots with the D3200, those extra MegaPixels DO count, if you know what you are doing. My brother-in-law (who just bought a Nikon D800 for $3,000 with no lens) was surprised at a shot I took at 6000x4000 JPG resolution, hand-held with available light at 1/20th of a second with the "stock" lens that comes with the camera. You can blow the picture up to 36" and still not see any blur! You can get even HIGHER quality pictures by shooting in RAW format....
Exposure bracketing is the only thing missing, IMO, but if they threw that in NOBODY would buy the D5100 or D7000 it's that good.
P.S. Make sure you get a HIGH Quality memory card to go with this camera. I got the SanDisk Extreme 32GB 45MB/s SDHC Flash Memory Card (from Amazon, of course) and it's a great combo for burst shooting or HD Video use.The sensor is all you'd expect it to be, and will deliver poster-size enlargements with no apparent pixelization; but when it comes to image quality, the sensor is only part of the pipeline. The kit lens is all very well and plenty-good-enough for casual shooting, but making the most of 24 megapixels suggests the use of better optics, such as the fixed-focal-length Nikkor 60mm f/1.8, and flash or a tripod. Older lenses won't autofocus with the D3200--you need the newer AF-S models--but you can focus manually with any lens using a built-in rangefinder function which is buried in the menu system.
There are compromises with the D3200, just as there are with any entry-level camera. The autofocus hunts a little in low light and with low-contrast scenes, burst mode isn't that fast, video playback flickers, and the memory chip needs a little time to swallow each RAW shot. If you're not a pro, you don't need a camera that grabs each shot with the voracity of an Australian salt-water crocodile. If you think you do, the D800 may be worth your kilobucks.
You can take this camera out of the box, charge it up, fire away in auto mode, and get 16x20 enlargements of excellent image quality--just as photographers have been doing for years with 5-megapixel point-and-shoots. Don't stop there. Sweat the details and make photomurals that knock your socks off and curl your toes. The technology's there, but mastering it is something only you can do.
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