Must. Not. Buy. D800.

fabgo said:

Stick with your D90. The high resolution D800 is going to demand a lot more from both your craft and your equipment. It's going to be challenging to keep the camera steady, and only the best lenses will resolve full detail all the way to the corners.

I am planning to buy a D800E, but I am also buying a number of expensive primes to match, and am fully prepared to have the camera spend the majority of its life on top of a tripod.

I also just bought a m4/3 system for travel/street photography. It's super lightweight, easy to carry, with high quality sensors and optics. I expect to use this more than the D800.

Instead of buying the D800, you might consider waiting for the D400 or the D700 replacement likely coming next year. The D7000 is also an option, but honestly, I don't recommend it at this point as the auto-focus has back/front focusing issues.

--
Fabian

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Varuas said:

Thanks for differing suggestions!

If I upgrade, which is 50-50 I will, I will not be getting any new lenses any time soon. I already have 35 1.8, so it will cover all of FF with slight vignetting, so I am fine with it being the main lens

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Varuas said:

. If I need reach, I can always put on my 60mm f2 macro and crop like crazy... still get sharp images.

But I kind of agree that #3k+ is rather excessive for me to upgrade.

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surf1 said:

It makes very little sense in my opinion to buy a FF camera without a decent set of FF lenses.

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surf1 said:

The standard package would be the 24-70 and 70-200 F2.8 - which is another 4k$, totalling 7k investment for a complete package. You sure can economize a lot on the lenses, but I would say it makes no sense not to consider the cost of additional lenses at all. It's a big decision.

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surf1 said:

I think it's better to invest now in good FF lenses for your D90 and buy the D800 or D900 later when you are ready...

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surf1 said:

FWIW, I had a hard time convincing myself spending the money for the 70-200 VR (old version), and now it's one of my favorite lenses and togehter with learning to use the Nikon CLS has allowed me to take much better photos with my D300.

The D800 is ordered together with the 24-70 and accessories (5k) and I think I will have to upgrade to a MacBook Pro 15" to get better graphics processing, another 2+k.

Cheers, Surf

Varuas said:

Thanks for differing suggestions!

If I upgrade, which is 50-50 I will, I will not be getting any new lenses any time soon. I already have 35 1.8, so it will cover all of FF with slight vignetting, so I am fine with it being the main lens. If I need reach, I can always put on my 60mm f2 macro and crop like crazy... still get sharp images.

But I kind of agree that #3k+ is rather excessive for me to upgrade.

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AgentHEX said:

The sensor shouldn't be the only area of consideration, since there are also other marginal improvements to AF/metering/ergo.

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Ayrshirephotographer said:

You have been seriously misled. There is no reason the camera has to spend most it's life on a tripod. You just have to be much more aware of your focal length and shutter speed. It's basics...Secondly all lenses get better with more resolution, the better one's get 'more better' than the bad ones. So that's a non-arguement. The D800 will give more detailed shots if you pay attention to photography basics.

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SeeRoy said:

Plenty of constructive observations have already been expressed. However I do find attitudes to cropping (quite a few expressed here) rather strange. Unless one feels that the standard aspect ratio is something that's a fixed reference value, ie every image should rightly accommodate itself to these proportions - which is a bizarre notion IMHO - then a substantial proportion of photographs are optimised by some degree of cropping. Unless of course they're all intended to fit into a standard format display medium. Try telling an experienced picture editor that cropping's usually unnecessary.

Additionally, in an uncontrolled situation such as encountered in landscape photography, (on the hoof rather than pre-planned) the ability to crop - heavily in the case of a 36MP camera - is a lot more convenient than carrying additional long f/l (and heavy) lenses. So the notion that "learning to frame/compose correctly" is a total substitute for cropping seems nonsensical to me. What sort of focal lengths would wildlife photographers need to eliminate the requirement to crop images of small birds, for example?

All the above assumes that there are enough pixels available for the intended use of the cropped image.

Roy

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