Definitely good enough for me. My yardstick is my trusty Mamiya 645 and Portra 400 film, and the Nikon D800E is close enough.
Both colour negative film and my Nikon D800E have similar resolution, allowing me to easily make A1 wide (3 feet) prints for gallery exhibitions that are tack sharp close up. And their dynamic range is also close enough (I agree with
him) - film has more latitude if correcting a particularly bad exposure, but then I shouldn't be getting my exposure wrong in the first place!
I do prefer the muted unique colours of Portra, but you can't have everything. The Nikon's colour in portrait mode is natural and gently muted - but different.
I use both the Nikon and Mamiya all the time, and sometimes "mix and match" them in a project: no one can tell the difference even in huge prints once I've added a little faux film grain to the Nikon images.
(I add grain as a matter of course to large digital prints, just visible enough to break up the image. This gives a more natural-seeming, random print surface, especially to edges and blocks of tone, which is how grain affects the appearance of analogue prints - if you had grainless film, it'd have that slightly unreal "digital" appearance. Adding grain also - counter-intuitively - makes digital images seem sharper and crisper. I bought the D800E rather than the D800 for a similar reason: images from digital cameras without an anti-aliasing filter have more micro detail and better tonality than those with a filter, and are thus more "film-like".)
Back on topic after that minor digression on grain, I doubt further improvements to 35 mm "full frame" dSLR image quality will interest me. 36 MP is about as high as you can go for the size of sensor, and that's plenty of resolution for me! More would just create really cumbersome files, and I won't be printing over 4 feet wide very often! The ISO range is also plenty high enough - I don't need to shoot in darkness! And, as I said, the dynamic range is already excellent.
As for functions, I don't want them! I just need shutter speed, aperture and centre-weighted exposure (the same as my Mamiya 645 film camera) - with the addition of ISO. I ignore everything else: I have never shot video on my D800E, my lenses are all manual, and I've replaced the focusing screen with an olde worlde microsprism one.
What I'd really like is a Nikon F with a D800E sensor and screen! I had hopes for the Nikon DF, but these were dashed - Nikon built a fashion statement, a poseurs' tool for those wanting to buy into nostalgia, rather than a serious photographic tool for professionals who prefer cameras with traditional "film" controls.
