Nikon keeps looking for more mountains to climb. A little after unveiling its new D4 flagship DSLR and a point-and-shoot with world’s longest zoom, the company has announced a new special-format camera that’s said to be able to capture photos with higher resolution than any commercially available DSLR on Earth.


The camera is called the D800, and it snaps photos at a whopping 36.3 megapixels, more than double the maximum resolution of the D4, which maxes out at 16.2MP. The D800 can capture those ultra-crisp photos thanks to its full-frame CMOS sensor, which Nikon calls FX format. “Full frame” means the image sensor is the same size as a frame of 35mm film — significantly larger than a typical APS-C sensor in a normal DSLR.

When you have that many pixels, you need performance that can handle it, and the D800 boasts a new image processor called the Expeed 3. With the full-frame sensor and processing engine, Nikon says the camera’s pixel count is the world’s highest, though it qualifies the claim by only including DSLRs with interchangeable lenses with full-frame sensors. Medium-format cameras, such as ones made by Hasselblad or Phase One, can have pixel counts much higher.