Thoughts on using a D800 from a long time D300 shooter

As many of you who regularly read this forum know, I'm a long time D300 owner, I primarily shoot daytime sports and occasionally birds and I'm awaiting/hoping for a D400. I've not been enticed to any of Nikon's FX cameras mostly because of reach issues, but also because of what it would cost to switch my whole system over to FX.

But, I had three events this weekend to photograph (two twi-night soccer games and a theater production), all of which screamed out for the high ISO performance of FX so I looked at what our local rental outfit had available - a D3, D800 or D600. After debating the pros/cons of each, I decided to rent the D800 both because the higher pixel count might help compensate for loss of reach at the soccer game and the higher-end AF (vs. the D600) would be good. I flirted with the notion of the D3 (I would have loved the AF and the fps), but I'm not very likely to buy a D3 or D4 (too expensive and reach concerns) so I thought it might be more useful in terms of education about future purchases to see how the D800 did.

This post is a summary of how the experience went (through the eyes of a long time DX shooter, D300 and before that D2x). In summary, the D800 is a very impressive camera, but it is not for me as my main camera to shoot action with.

The pluses for me are:

• The high ISO performance is simply remarkable (compared to the D300). I wouldn't have even attempted shooting this venue with my D300 as the shots in one soccer game were all between ISO 10000 and 25600 (yes it was quite dark) at f/4 and 1/640. While the shots are compromised from the high ISO, they are worthy of sharing with the team and good enough to serve many purposes. I also shot a few scenes from a high school theater production (photography was allowed, but no flash) and again, I could not have gotten usable shots from my D300 in such low light, but the folks I was shooting for were very pleased with the shots I provided from the D800.

• The first soccer game started in twilight (setting sun, mix of sun and shade) and I was really impressed with both the DR and the ability to recover detail from shadows.

• Amazing auto-focus. The D800 was focusing on and accurately tracking erratically moving soccer players in near dark conditions, even with dark blue uniforms. I know my D300 would have seriously struggled for AF in these conditions as I've seen the D300 struggle with dark colored uniforms in much more light than this. The D800 did convince me that I want this level of AF performance in my next camera (which rules out a D600).

• The shallower depth of field of shooting FX is really nice for more subject isolation in sports shots. There are shots where the extra background blur does really add something to the shot. I've long known that shooting with the 200-400 f/4 was giving up a stop of background blur vs. shooting with an f/2.8 prime, but I chose the flexibility of the zoom to allow me to shoot more places on the field. The extra background blur of FX was nice though.

• The ability to heavily crop and still have 12MP or more remaining can certainly be useful. It actually lets you be somewhat lazy with the framing because you can shoot looser and crop later and still have lots of pixels left.

• I like the D800 body, build, controls and settings. Though there are certainly differences between it and the D300, but they are all evolutionary and my fingers felt at home on the D800 without any retraining. As I use AF-ON exclusively for focusing, I appreciated a dedicated AF-ON button in the exact position I'm trained for.

The minuses for me are:

• I really, really missed the 8 fps of my D300 + grip. For reasons which we never figured out before I had to return the camera, I was never able to achieve more than about 2 fps at the soccer venues. Since this is such a slow rate, I had to completely change how I shot sports essentially planning to try for perfect timing on only one shot for each action moment instead of a short burst for each moment. I missed a lot of shots because of this. The inability to even get to 4fps is being discussed in a separate thread here: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3348952, but there's no way I would buy this camera primarily for action sports even at 4 fps. The two main suspects right now preventing even the 4 fps are that the D800 won't do 4 fps with auto ISO on in very low light or that it was having exposure calculation issues with the 60Hz flicker in the high school stadium lights. It did achieve 4 fps in my home office before the shoot, just never at the actual venue. Since I don't still have the camera (had to return the rental), I can't troubleshoot this further.

• I really have no desire for 36MP images. I never print large enough to actually need that many pixels and I felt the effects of having that many pixels in both the reduced fps and in all the post processing steps. If I were going to deal with these large images on a regular basis, I'd have to replace my memory cards, replace my computer, replace my card reader, buy a couple more hard disks (main storage and backup storage), switch to a different ISP and pay for faster upload bandwidth (mostly for Backblaze online backup of the RAW files, but also for posting thousands of images online). While all of those changes are doable to try to stay as productive as I am now (at a significant cost though), one wonders why put up with the giant size files when you don't really need them?

• I could not own a 36MP camera without a serious computer upgrade. Though I have an Intel quad-core processor from 4 years ago (a pretty fast computer at the time), as soon as I apply any noise reduction in Lightroom, any image manipulation comes to a serious halt, often taking 5-10 seconds to respond to any editing operation. I learned that I had to set the noise reduction slider last and any time I wanted to re-edit an image, the first thing I had to do was to turn off the noise reduction slider, make my edits and then reapply the noise reduction when done. To try to edit with noise reduction on was pretty much impossible because there is no interactivity with other sliders (5-10 second response time). This computer was fine for 12MP images, but it is not productive for 36MP images at all.

• I did miss the reach I would normally have on my D300, but the issue was partially offset (only partially though) by the ability to crop heavily. There is a limit to cropping heavily though because when the subject gets small in the viewfinder it is harder to track, harder to auto-focus on reliably and harder to identify when the AF is on the right part of the subject or not (seeing where AF was at a cropped reach was pretty much impossible in the night-time shots). So, while I recovered some longer reach shots with cropping, others were lost due to the inability to capture the right shot at the smaller magnification. Obviously, this is a trade off. You somewhat extend the range of the zoom (more room to crop), but you can't reliably reach to the same spots I'm used to shooting. As expected cropping in the FX viewfinder is an occasionally helpful crutch, but not a substitute for a viewfinder and AF designed for the extra reach. I was also surprised how much you see the noise quality (at very high ISOs) deteriorate when you crop heavily. One advantage of the 36MP is that the noise is extremely fine grain and almost melts away when you downsize at all, but if you crop heavily, you lose much of that advantage. It's still way ahead of where my D300 is, but you can see it deteriorate from where a native FX shot is when you crop.

• The D800 costs about $1200 more than my D300 did and for me to switch to it for most of my shooting would require me to replace a number of DX lenses (17-55, 10-20, 18-200) and perhaps replace my older 70-200 which apparently doesn't have great FX corners. I haven't priced out those replacements, but it could be north of $5000 just in new lenses to move that glass to FX. My long glass wouldn't have to change thankfully.

Conclusions. I came to a number of conclusions from my experience:

• I really don't want 36MP and the added pain of moving that much data around. I'd much rather have 18-24MP. My ideal would probably be 24MP in FX or 18MP in DX.

• The D800 AF is amazing. I must have something at least that good in my next camera.

• I really missed not having 8 fps and the fps I could get out of the D800 at the low light soccer venues was way too big a compromise for it to ever be my main action camera ever. Certainly, you can shoot action at 4fps, but it's more of a compromise than I want when buying that expensive a camera.

• The low light advantages of FX are unbeatable for some types of shooting. It is unbelievable what kind of images you can get at ISO 10000. I can definitely see owning two bodies, a D400 for long reach action when there is decent light and an FX body for some other types of shooting - particularly when the light is low. A D600 + D400 is one possible pair or perhaps even a used D3s at some point (when they come down some more).

• So, I guess I sit back, keep shooting with my D300 and wait for Nikon to come out with a camera I really want. In DX, I'd still like a D400 with the build and controls of the D300, the AF from the D4/D800, at least 8fps in all conditions and a 18-24MP sensor that's the best DX sensor they've ever made. In FX, the only FX camera I'd consider now to be used for action would be more of a true D700 upgrade (I'll refer to it as a D750) that was 24MP, 8fps and had the D800/D4 AF. I hold out more hope for the D400 than I do the D750 as the FX line is probably set for a little while and it isn't clear how Nikon would position a D750 vs. the D800.

So ... I went into the den of FX, found some things I liked and came back still waiting for a D400 though I could definitely see some advantages to having one of each (both D400 and an FX camera for other low light photography).

Here are some of the D800 images from two different soccer fields and a theater:



Twilight image in partial sun - needed serious highlight recovery to make it usable

This field had a stop more light than the other field and it was a better color, but still pretty dark

Mixed lighting in this shot, even across one person - partly due to reflected green off the turf

Much darker near the sidelines

Every image had to be hand tweaked for white balance because of variation on the field

One shot from a high school drama production of Scrooge

--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com