Blown away

Ended up getting a job over by my local Calumet at the end of the day - real friendly bloke in there and I've bought quite a bit of gear of them.

Anyways I ended up playing with the D300 and this guy pulls out a couple of A3 prints on fine art paper - well I says they look fantastic - yep he says for ISO3200 its pretty good - couldn't believe it!!! - was sure it was just sales talk even though I thought this guy wouldn't BS me. Anyways we get over to the MAC and he pulls up the original pics with the exif - sure enough 3200!!! The whole bunch of pics that day was fantastic - it was down at London Zoo - a day out courtesy of Nikon - he said he was given the D3 but ended up using the D300 most of the day - saw the D3 files and they were great but the 300 stood up well - fantastically well. What got me was not only the superb low noise but it didn't seem to get fooled by difficult exposure levels - you know the sort of thing, shooting inside an aquarium with poor light and no flash. Ended up playing with the pics but even trying I couldn't fault them. OK he was playing with the finest glass Nikon could provide (one of them was a £££ 400 2.8 and the other an £800 17-55 2.8 ) but in the little I know about it all isn't the noise mostly to do with the sensor/electronics/firmware?
I used to have a Nikon EM a million years ago and sold it for a Pentax point and shoot and had Pentax ever since, but that 300 is an excellent bit of kit.

I'm hoping the 20 is gonna be good but if its just very nearly as good then I'm first in the queue.