I know many of you are dying to hear what I've got to say about all the new Nikon products that have appeared since I headed off into the African wild, so I'll give you a little tease:
The top image is a 100% view of a straight Capture NX2 conversion of a D7000 NEF taken in my test gym. ISO 3200, no noise reduction, default sharpening, all the usual parameters for my test images. The bottom is the same file processed via ACR 6.3 Beta about as best as I could come up with using Adobe's sharpening and noise reduction controls plus a bit of other adjustment to make up for the deliberate slight underexpose I set in my tests (curiously, the camera wanted to set something close to my underexposure as its actual exposure, but that's a different story for a different day and is easily explained). Yes, there's some noise reduction smudging going on (the camera actually does slightly better in JPEGs than this).
Still, this is the best cropped sensor low light results I've seen to date (and yes, I've tested Sony and Canon cameras in this environment). Remember, we've got a lot of pixels here (16mp). For the 12mp cameras we've been seeing about this much of the scene at 100% view (image shown below is resized D7000):
So you're wondering if the D7000 performs decently in low light? Yes, it does. But don't believe all the bull you see on some Internet forums: this is not D700 let alone D3s level of performance. It's quite good performance, though, enough to bring DX users into the low light. In particular, if I were photographing a basketball game with a D90 and D7000 side by side and displaying the resulting images at the same size, the D7000 wins hands down. It's got cleaner color, more detail, and less noise when I clean both up and print them. To refresh your memory, here's the D90 (this isn't quite an apples-to-apples comparison--remember these are frequency based lights, and there's some slightly misleading resizing going on here --but it's close enough to give you an idea of what to expect [note the loss of color in the ball, especially on the shadow side]):
So, Nikon? Please leave software to others (see next story). But please continue making hardware.