[matthew]

I've done a rudimentary check on the left/right focusing on my camera, and found no problems, and I'll happily use the various points as needed. When I have a large enough wall and a tripod I'll run a more careful check. But even if I find a discrepancy, I'm not overly concerned; it's an easy fix at Nikon and I have a two-year warranty.

It's unrelated, but I've gone through most of my lenses for AF tuning, using the centre point, and found that three of the four needed a slight adjustment (5-10 points) in the same direction. I tried that once with my D700, but couldn't see any difference in the focusing results – probably not enough resolution to see the differences.

Thom Hogan points out that the extra scrutiny on Nikon's focusing, with such a massive resolution to reveal any faults in the lens or technique, is likely to create a huge number of 'false positives' as people go looking for problems. This turns up the noise on the large web forums, gets more people with internet access and insufficient experience with the camera to look harder at their results… good times.