My initial impression: a little soft. I think the 70 - 300 VR can do better. The serious tests certainly say it can. Here are a couple of shots with the Nikkor AF-S 70 - 300 VR at 300mm on my D7000; F5.6 1/2500 sec. ISO 200. The first with no crop, the second cropped in on the bird. Both of these have been sharpened in Nikon View NX2. Of course with a bird in flight shot from a rocking boat lack of sharpness could also be blamed on motion.

I really like the lens...have the II version on a D7000. Here's a shot of Cefalu Cathedral in Sicily taken at 11 mm and F5.6

Cefalu Cathedral, begun in 1131

(Download)

You really need to be very clear about what is your standard of acceptable sharpness for your photos, when viewed on your computer screen. You will not get as good sharpness with an 18 - 300 or 16 - 300 zoom as with a comparable quality modern zoom that has a shorter range, especially at the extremes of range and at the edges of frames. But this may not bother you or anyone else whose opinion you value. Personally I dislike looking at one of my shots and thinking "hmm, that looks a little soft."
Which is why I put up with changing lenses in the field, or traveling light without the ability to make 300mm shots at all.

The study was paid for by H-P. That should give one pause.

In deciding between cameras it is essential to know what kind of shots one is after. To me low light shots with great IQ are very important, so a small sensor camera just won't do.

It took me about 1/10 sec to see that the FX40 shot is soft and noisy. If that doesn't bother one, fine.

There is much to be learned about composition by watching movies, even old ones. Hollywood cinematographers are masters of composition and often take hours setting up and lighting a shot. They often like to get very close to the action and their subjects, which adds to engagement and dynamism. This works for stills too. Action in movies is often toward and away from the camera which means care is taken to have interest in foreground, middleground and background, another concept that draws viewer in to the shot, be it cine or still.

Forgot to mention my box has 16 Gb RAM. System is on SSD, photos go on 2 TB HD. Some use another or same SSD for photos; I tried that for no increase in speed.

Corel PSP X6 opens completely in 10 seconds on my computer. Intel i 7 4770 processor and Samsung EVO SSD

I stand corrected on the main reason for the 16 Mp. Shot from the hip. But what would be the real world advantage of 100Mp sensors? And more to the point, what advancement in semi-conductors would make them possible?

Don't be surprised if the number of pixels in any DSLR never goes too far past 36 million. Limitations of physics involving noise are the reason. Signal to noise is worse for smaller pixels. That's why Nikon kept the number of pixels in its most expensive camera to 16 million.

With a price around $700 for a D7100 gray market is not the issue. That amount is below the price Nikon charges dealers for the camera anywhere in the world. So there has to be a scam.

Three excellent shots!

A practical workflow when using Paint Shop Pro and RAW is to do the RAW processing in another program, output from there in Jpeg or Tiff and then proceed with PSP. Nikon's View NX2, which comes with Nikon cameras, provides much more flexibility in RAW processing than PSP does and it's free. Canon also provides a free RAW processor. For high end work and to get the most out of the data in RAW you would need to use a full featured RAW processor such as found in Lightroom or Capture One software.

Nikon Capture NX-D is available for free download on the Nikon website

http://www.nikonusa.com/en/Nikon-Products/Product/Imaging-Software/Capture-NX-D.html

It has many features that Nikon View NX-2 lacks. However I found it to be clunky, and not user friendly compared to View NX-2 and other comparable software.