Nikon D810A Review

ok, I understand the differences towards the normal model. but what about a CCD for astrophotography? do you have comparisons here? I mean cooling to like -20 degress celsius, monocrome, automatic focussing etc. I ask myself what do i loose buying a D810a compared e.g. to an equally expensive astro-CCD? I gain a very good D810 in normal light, when i do RAW + some more, that would be great. but only talking about astrophotography, to I loose too much on the other side?

elgol20 said:

ok, I understand the differences towards the normal model. but what about a CCD for astrophotography? do you have comparisons here? I mean cooling to like -20 degress celsius, monocrome, automatic focussing etc. I ask myself what do i loose buying a D810a compared e.g. to an equally expensive astro-CCD? I gain a very good D810 in normal light, when i do RAW + some more, that would be great. but only talking about astrophotography, to I loose too much on the other side?

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I haven't done any comparison to CCD cameras. If we just look at astrophotography (AP) you can pretty much say that a CCD will get you a cleaner image due to cooling etc. If you're really serious about AP you would like an monochrome CCD with filters, that will give you the best images of the sky. Just remember that they're not snapshot cameras, you need to learn some serious post processing skills to get really good images.

For me a CCD isn't an option since I don't want to bring a computer with me for taking pictures.

The 810A dark frame subtraction is very effective.

Hello

I got yesterday my D810A... wow !!!

Nikon has done a really good step to astronomers.

I will compare with my A7s modded but in term of sensitivity, the 2 bodies will be close.

It is amazing to see a 600s dark at 6400 iso with so low noise at room temperature.

The boosted live-view seems a real good point in astrophotography to detect stars, field, or center the image when doing nightscapes !

I am really impresionned. It confirms also the test you has done. I will go deeply and compare with D4s and A7s noise levels and sensibility during night.

Thanks Nikon to have done such a body like this.

CCD1024 said:

Hello

I got yesterday my D810A... wow !!!

Nikon has done a really good step to astronomers.

I will compare with my A7s modded but in term of sensitivity, the 2 bodies will be close.

It is amazing to see a 600s dark at 6400 iso with so low noise at room temperature.

The boosted live-view seems a real good point in astrophotography to detect stars, field, or center the image when doing nightscapes !

I am really impresionned. It confirms also the test you has done. I will go deeply and compare with D4s and A7s noise levels and sensibility during night.

Thanks Nikon to have done such a body like this.

Click to expand...

Great and congrats

Looking forward to a second opinion on the camera and it will also be interesting to see a comparison with D4s.

Goran Strand said:

elgol20 said:

ok, I understand the differences towards the normal model. but what about a CCD for astrophotography? do you have comparisons here? I mean cooling to like -20 degress celsius, monocrome, automatic focussing etc. I ask myself what do i loose buying a D810a compared e.g. to an equally expensive astro-CCD? I gain a very good D810 in normal light, when i do RAW + some more, that would be great. but only talking about astrophotography, to I loose too much on the other side?

Click to expand...

I haven't done any comparison to CCD cameras. If we just look at astrophotography (AP) you can pretty much say that a CCD will get you a cleaner image due to cooling etc. If you're really serious about AP you would like an monochrome CCD with filters, that will give you the best images of the sky. Just remember that they're not snapshot cameras, you need to learn some serious post processing skills to get really good images.

For me a CCD isn't an option since I don't want to bring a computer with me for taking pictures.

--
Astrophotographer Göran Strand, Sweden
http://www.astrofotografen.se

Click to expand...

I am kinda in a similar situation: for me wheight and ease of use is very important, yet also some quality. I would have no problem of having like 70 or 80% of the quality of a special AP CCD when having the D810a.

what would be the difference betwenn the d810a and a modified d800E only concerning image quality?

Thanks for sharing your information and images with us!

elgol20 said:

I am kinda in a similar situation: for me wheight and ease of use is very important, yet also some quality. I would have no problem of having like 70 or 80% of the quality of a special AP CCD when having the D810a.

what would be the difference betwenn the d810a and a modified d800E only concerning image quality?

Click to expand...

It's har du say before I done some more tests with a D810A under the stars. But from looking at the noise levels I would expect them to be much better. Remains to be seen what happens to the colors and dynamic range when the ISO goes up. The D3s has a higher dynamic range from ISO 400 and above over the D800 and D810, at least according to DxOMark



It will be interesting to see the D810A in this chart.

--
Astrophotographer Göran Strand, Sweden

You are showing the per pixel DR. Downsized the difference shrinks a lot. One advantage of the D810 for me is the amazing DR at base ISO and the possibility to downsize to 12 or 16MP for high ISOs to increase DR and S/N ratio.

Goran Strand said:

Great and congrats

Looking forward to a second opinion on the camera and it will also be interesting to see a comparison with D4s.

--

Click to expand...

Hi

Difficult to synthetize all measure as I don't use the same method.

I determined readout noise of my D810A around 2.2 e- at 3200 iso and 4.5 e- at 200 iso

readout noise of the A7s is close than 1 e-

Thermal noise of D810A is nice !

But the A7s is not bad at all (even less than D810A) but strange in its structure because of Sony tweaks in the compression algorithm.

D810A raws are not read under DXO or Adobe. I can open them under RawDigger and PIXINSIGHT. And for sure under Nikon Capture NX-D.

I didn't test under sky (my sky has light pollution) but I will do it ASAP.

In normal condition, red extension was not a problem for me. WB can be easily adjusted

I try to see what is the improvement in infrared wavelength as results are slighty different between D810A, D4s and A7s "astrodon" !

For me, D810A is interesting but high density pixels (36Mpix) is not the best. But the infrared extension is what I need in priority and long exposure capacity (better RAW quality than A7s) can really match a high resolution astronomy image on a nice lense.

But I will also test something different. If, for the same lense, I made a software binning of 7x7 on D810A and 4x4 on A7s, I will obtain a ~1050 pix with same sampling for 2 cameras. I will see how it runs.

I didn't had time to write the comparison on my website (I will open a new blog) but I will work on it soon.

Philippe

Thank you very much for an excellent review!

What I cannot get, however, is why in your tests the performance of D810 is much better than D800E whereas, according to dxomark.com, the ISO performance of D810 and D800E is virtually the same (D800E being even a bit better)????