Why Nikon D700 12.1MP price around 3K?

It has 12mp but why it cost to much?

Because enough people are willing to pay that price.

It's a full frame camera. A bit on the high side though. Refurbished D700s are around $2k.

I have no idea why it's still so much when the Canon 5d mkiii and Nikon d800 are out, but it still performs really well.

Its a very rugged camera with amazing lowlight capabilities - due in part to the fact that the pixels are larger- 12mpx on a full frame sensor.

There are instances where I would welcome a camera like that. I shoot architecture for Realtors, and have no need of huge images and the cumbersome file sizes that go with them. I would think that a D700 would be a great camera in that case.

Take a look at the D3s. It has 12MP too but it costs even around 4K.

The reason is that megapixels have *nothing* to do with image quality or the quality of the camera itself. They are just the number of pixels. What matters is how accurate the camera measures the color of each pixel. For this, there are huge differences. A 12MP point and shoot camera will suffer huge measurement errors when it detemines the color of each pixel, due to the low influx of light onto its tiny sensor.

A D700 with its huge sensor (expensive to make) on the other hand gathers lots of light and thus can make a much more accurate measurement of the light that falls onto each pixel.