Equipment D800.. getting bored of waiting.

Aaaargh! Just release the D800 aleady!

Sorry.. just sick of waiting.

 

Just get a 1D X

 

Yeah... I'm sure all my Nikkors will fit Also, it's a mere 18MP, and costs over 5K.. no thanks

D800... full size chip, 36mp goodness, probably going to be a grand less than the 1D X.

 

36mp? oof your hard disk is going to take a pounding

 

Hard drives are cheap... Oh.. hang on... LOL


Damned typhoons.

 

36mp? Even for full frame, thats probably 5+mp more than most glass can resolve.

 

Exactly.. it's called headroom!

 

Due to the floods I'm guessing it will be another two months before it;s announced, and another4 to 6 till you can buy one. Personally, the D800 doesn't offer me anything that I need. If they had given it D3s specs, except for the fps, I would've been interested. More mp, video and same Iso, not so much.

 

The low light performance wont be as good as the D3s or D7000, granted, but it will still be good. I'll stil have my D7000 for low light use though remember, so no great loss for me. The resolution boost will be great. If I had a D700, jumping up from 12 to 36mp would outweigh everything else. I'm pushing the limits of 16mp now with A2 prints. 12mp just don't cut it. I'm struggling to think what advantage the D700 would have, unless I'm missing something.

 

36 freaking megapixels on a FF sensor... mega LOL - I thought the Sony A900 with 24.6MP was bad (incidentally it actually was). I'm totally out of touch with Nikon since moving to Canon, and to see them finally break the mold of low res on big sensors is...surprising. At least they did it in style lol.

Pook, out of curiosity - besides teaching, what photography do you do that requires large format printing? Is it a new movement in wedding album design?

I have only 17MP and 12MP bodies and they are more than enough for the vast majority of my work.

 

I think you made a typo there mate. As good as the D3s and D7000? Sure you didn't mean D700, as the D7000 is nothing like the D3s or D700 (close but no cigar), or just that you own/owned both the D3s and D7000? In any case, I fully expect the D800 will be as good as the D700 at high Iso's, but for me that's not worth the upgrade. If it were 24mp, with the Iso of the D3s with all the trimmings, then I'd be tempted, as it stands though, I'll pass.

As far as prints go I rarely print bigger than A3, and if I were going to do so, I doubt I'd need pin sharp detail at a ft distance etc. Not sure what viewing distance you are taking into account with yout current mp. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

 

Out of curiosity, Pook, what kinds of limitations are you running into when printing A2 with 16mp? We have D2Xs and D3s cameras on the ISS, and we routinely print up to 40inch x 60inch; it's not uncommon to print even larger. At only 12mp, I was surprised just how well the prints hold up even at such large sizes.

 

Never shot a wedding in my life.

I do all manner of commercial work, (although much less these days) and it's printed at all manner of sizes. Normally for high print sizes I'll be using the Hasselblad/Phase One back combo, but I've experimented with the D7000 to see how far it can go, and around A2 starts to look a little crusty.

The attraction of a full frame 36mp body is that I can retire the 'bladd as it's a pig to use compared to a SLR, and the D800 can actually become a mainstay in the studio.

I sold the D3 when I got the D7000. It suddenly became redundant for most things. As I was (and still am) using the "Hassle"blad, I was only using the D3 for anything location. As it was heavy, and blatantly not as good as the D3, it had to go. The D7000 kicked the D3's butt in pretty much every respect, and was half the weight. A no brainer. The only people I talk to who have an issue with that are actually amateurs. Every other pro I've talked to would have done the same thing. I can count the times I've NEEDED a full frame camera on one hand.

Nothing like? It's so close that you have to spend some time switching between shots taken at ISO 25600 to notice the D700's advantage. At lower ISO than 3200 there's practically no difference. The D700 has a contrast advantage past ISO 12800, but the actual noise levels are very, very close. Good comparison shots here . Considering the size of the D700's sensor, the D7000 is quite an achievement.

....but also that as well I owned the vanilla D3, but have used the D3s many times.

I'm talking about withstanding close scrutiny, which my work is often subject to in a gallery environment. Ironically, it's my personal work that requires the higher quality, but the ability to have that resolution in a camera that isn't as much a pain in the ass as the Hasselblad will be a major bonus for me.

Just resolution limitations. So far as I'm concerned, if you can see it's a digital image on close inspection, it's not good enough.. so basically.. visible aliasing.

 

Had a look at the comparisons, nothing like the D700, that's like saying the D700 is in the league of the D3s, it's not. The Iso 1600 of the D7000 looks like the 3200 of the D700, and in the case of the D3s, the D700's Iso 6400 looks like the D3s's Iso 12k. Impressive for a crop body no doubt, but not quite the enough to make me sell the D700 and get two D7k's.

 

I was looking at the really High ISO examples actually. The difference is marginal. However... highlighting the differences in the lower ISOs (1600 or so) just makes my point for me even more. If the D800 will equal the D700 in the noise stakes, I can even sell the D7000 when I upgrade.

If I had a D700 I'd be selling it while they still command a decent price because there's going to be a **** load of them on ebay when the D800 comes out.

Anyway... this is all conjecture, as it's not released yet. All we know for sure is that it's 36MP and full frame.. all else is guessing at the moment.

 

A 36 megapixel full-frame sensor is going to be diffraction limited at f/6.3 if my calculations are correct, which would strike me as a little crazy if it's the resolution Nikon's attempting to pack into the D800's sensor. I find the 5D2's sharpness drops off between f/8 and f/11 because of diffraction and by f/22 it's soft - I'd say its resolving power is down to about half its full resolution at that point. Laws of physics and all that.

Pook, I think you'll be surprised how little those extra pixels will improve things for you - I'd honestly be looking down the MF route if I wanted a digital camera to print files larger than A2/A1. That's not some anti Nikon crusade, it's just matter of fact - I haven't been happy with the large prints I've been selling that came from my 5D2 which is one (but not the only) reason I got into 5x4. The biggest I've printed from my 5D2 was an 100x80cm canvas of an image made with my 45mm TS-E - the second sharpest lens I've got on my Canon system - and it was a little ropey if I recall (acceptable, but only just). That's somewhere between A1 and A0 in size, for reference purposes.

As I'm sure you know, overall sharpness isn't just related to the pixel size, but also the quality of the lenses - you'll get much simpler, higher quality lenses on a medium format body. I'm not saying that Nikon's F mount lenses are poor - in actual fact it's quite the opposite - but they're inherently complex in comparison to medium format equivalents and will therefore never reach their optical quality. Certainly from the comparisons I've seen from a good friend of mine who does commercial product photography for a bunch of magazines, the 5D2 with the best glass available is no match for a Phase One P25 - it's only got 1 million extra pixels, but the difference in quality in the files is night and day. The comparisons I've done between the 5D2 and large format film are even more pronounced - I thought my 24mm TS-E was a damn sharp lens, but my Nikkor 135mm f/5.6 absolutely obliterates it and best of all it only cost £120.

Personally, I think we're at the point now where the law of diminishing returns is pretty close on 35mm 'full frame' sensors if we are not already there now - you can't get much more than 20 megapixels out of a 35mm Velvia 50 slide (the finest grain emulsion available) shot on one of the sharpest lenses available in the film era - I'm thinking of the Vivitar Series 1 90mm f/2.5 macro - and scanned on a £20,000 drum scanner so I can't see us ever getting much more than that (in terms of true resolution) from a digital file. The digital files will be naturally crisper than an equivalent image shot on film and scanned, but the scanned film would beat the pants off the digital file for colour resolution - it's horses for courses in that respect and it's one reason why I persevere with large format film for my landscape work.

Just my 2 cents, but I hope it's useful - of course though, the proof will be in the pudding when Nikon eventually releases the camera (and some sample images).

 

I had an inkling that this was the case - you are very lucky to be doing commercial work instead IMO. My favourite jobs are the ones that don't involve photographing people, weirdly.

There is definitely a snobbery about FF cameras, even among pros in my experience - a sort of "the-tool-makes-the-tradesman" mentality. Personally I find the crop factor limiting at the wide end (stupidly priced UWA lenses) and it would make no sense for me to have one FF and one crop camera because of the focal length/FOV discrepancies. I haven't ever used Canon's flagship crop, the 18MP 7D, but I imagine it's pretty close to the professional bodies in terms of high ISO performance and IQ, which is why so many pros use it.

I get the "Hassle"blad vibe though lol my 1Ds2 is a beast to carry around for a whole day, especially with a heavy stabilized zoom lens, but needs must until I give my gear bag an overhaul. I have no reservations about going back to crop, although I must admit I was extremely surprised when I first heard that you went from D3 to D7000 - not that I thought it was an absurd move, just not commonly heard about!

@Tim, totally agree about diminishing returns regarding the FF sensor.

 

Sadly, and imho luckily, I wont be selling my D700, to have to wait six months till a new FX body, even if it did have the specs I'd like. I've seen them go for around £1k which is nothing, when you think a new D700 costs £1800!! I'm a bit strange in that if finances permit, I'd rather keep something that I get use out of, rather than sell it for a massive loss, then have to buy it's replacement for 15-20% more than what the new selling price is for my current body.

 

I agree with everything you are saying. I still reckon for studio work however, where you have full control over what aperture you are shooting at, you can squeeze the absolute max from any lens no matter how good with the D800, and if that proves to be good enough (I'll get one anyway regardless as it's a relatively light full frame cam with even more 1080P options than the D7000 for location) I'll be happy.

I agree with larger sensors, but I've already invested in Hasselblad/Phase one gear, and it's a pig to use compared to a SLR. If the D800 proves sufficient (I am not expecting it to outperform the blad) I will happily sell the Phase One gear to release some capital. Let's see what happens.. we don't even know how much the D800 will cost yet!

 

I'll see if I can dig up this article on it, but the conclusion was that at typical landscape photography apertures on 35mm (so f16-ish) you're essentially shooting a single-digit megapixel camera due to diffraction. That being said, I wish manufacturers would focus less on megapixels and more on things like increasing dynamic range, adding super-low ISO speeds (imagine being able to add a 10-stop neutral density filter by pushing a button), and ergonomics (I'd love a camera that can be operated while wearing gloves!)