My (probably worthless) take on this is that a good printer can not only reproduce all the detail in a D3 file, but can, in fact, reproduce a much higher level of detail. I am still living in the ‘good old days’, in as much as take on film and scan on a dedicated film scanner at 5400 dpi, and print to A3+ at 360 dpi. This gives me a 39 megapixel file of about 220 megabytes, which I print on an Epson R1800.

I posted some details a year or so ago of an experiment I did with a friend with his Nikon D2xs, a comparable pixel-count to the D3, albeit on a smaller sensor. We both took a picture of some large potted plants against a stone wall, in hazy sunlight. I used a Zeiss 50mm/1.4 lens, and my friend used the Sigma 30mm/1.4, both at f8 and tripod mounted. We then processed our images to our personal satisfaction in CS2 with minimal sharpening, and printed them on my printer at the best print resolution appropriate to producing an A3+ print.

While this was hardly a ‘scientific’ experiment, it did throw some light on your question. Viewed at a distance there was no discernable difference, other than colour rendition (I use Reala!), but on close examination there was a considerable difference. There was a coarseness in the D2xs image, due to the fact that it was printed at 220 dpi (see note below), rather than the 360 dpi on the scanned image, but the most obvious difference was that the fine hairs on the stem of the plants just weren’t there on the D2xs print. Whether they were present in the raw image, I don’t know (didn’t look!), so they could have been lost at any stage of the process, but the point is that the printer could produce a much higher level of detail than the D2xs could produce. I cannot see this changing with the D3, as the maximum resolution of the printer is stated as 1440 dpi, so printing at a fraction of this should preserve all the detail in the image.

Note: The unusual resolution of 220 dpi was used to fill an A3+ print. The print was redone at 240 dpi, a whole fraction of the 1440 dpi stated max of the printer, with no discernable difference in the detail shown, only a change in overall size.