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‹ Photo Notes · 16 února, 2012
About three days ago I dropped into the FotoŠkoda second-hand shop, where a Nikon representative was just presenting the new D800 digital SLR. For a few minutes I stopped by a group of photographers listening attentively to a waterfall of superlatives – seriously, I wondered for a moment whether that man had sold vacuum cleaners in the past and whether a future as an insurance agent awaits him.
But back to the point – purely hypothetically I thought about whether to buy the D800 or not.
Although the numbering suggests it, and everyone, me in this article too, speaks of the D800 as the successor to the D700, it isn’t quite so. Three years ago the D700 took over its image sensor from the D3, so logically the D800 should use the sensor from the current D4. But this time Nikon went a different way and designed a new type of sensor.
I am an extremely satisfied owner of the previous model, the D700. The new D800 costs practically the same as the D700 cost three years ago – that’s nice, when they’re not lowering the price anymore, at least they aren’t pushing it upwards either.
What did go rapidly up are some parameters of the new SLR.
Video
The D800 has Full HD video. The D700 has no video – there is nothing to compare here, the advantage of the 800 is clear. Somebody will probably say that for video we have camcorders and a camera is for taking photographs. But for relatively little money you get fantastic image quality, the possibility of changing lenses, excellent dynamic range without noise, depth of field.
Noise
I mentioned noise – the D700 is a camera I like to say freed me of limits, thanks to the ability to shoot in poor light conditions without noise or with minimal noise. Whoever hasn’t tried it won’t understand what a difference that is. In practice it means that I take most photographs at an ISO setting around 1000 and don’t worry about noise, I’m aware I can go higher, there is no noise. Photographs taken with a similar setting on older devices were on the edge of usability.
The D800 boasts that it goes even further. It’s possible, but there is one catch that keeps me a bit grounded for now, and it is, paradoxically, the high resolution on which Nikon builds its marketing. Higher resolution means more pixels, but if these pixels are on a surface of the same size, they must necessarily be smaller, and so less light information falls on each pixel. Around 2004 compact camera sensors, dimensioned for reasonable quality at 5 megapixels, began to be inflated to 7 or 8 megapixels. Everyone went for higher resolution, but the sensors were over-dimensioned with small pixels and the image quality was mostly worse than at 5 mpx.
One thing is certain – if we shrink a huge D800 photograph to internet resolution, we certainly won’t find any noise. But if we want to talk about professional printing, I dare claim the result will be comparable to the D700. I haven’t tried it, and in my favourite DxOMark database the D800 results haven’t been entered yet, so I hope I haven’t harmed the D800 with this hypothesis. I’ll certainly look forward to it once I try it on my own skin, and I promise to inform you. In case of error I will bow deeply to the D800.
Resolution
The biggest difference between the two models is the already mentioned sensor resolution. The D800 with 36 megapixels offers a resolution a full three times higher than the 12mpx D700 and proudly claims to have broken the record. That of course sounds very tempting, but what can it mean in practice apart from the smaller sensor pixels described above? Larger and faster memory cards, greater use of disk space, a longer time copying photographs from the card to the computer, greater demands on memory, processor and graphics when processing photographs and so on. Will existing lenses manage to feed such a high resolution with quality detail, or does a several-fold higher investment in the most expensive lenses await me? If we accept all this, we get photographs with a greater amount of detail, better usable for crops and for enlarging. On my wall hangs a photograph of 150 x 100 cm, taken with my D700. Its quality is entirely sufficient.
A number of other parameters were improved, but the aim of the article isn’t to describe them in detail; the technical parameters of the D800 and D700 for comparison can be found anywhere on the internet.
Buy or not buy?
If you have the latest iPhone in your pocket and you recently swapped your iPad for an iPad 2, definitely buy the D800. If you own a Nikon D200, D300 or one of the other older and cheaper models and are thinking about a quality upgrade at a relatively reasonable price, you have two options – buy second-hand the by now outgoing, but incredibly good and still modern D700, or invest in the newest D800 and gain even more. It is without doubt a fantastic camera, and the difference in the quality of the photographs and in the comfort of shooting itself will shock you. With both cameras.
But if you have a D700 at home and can’t justify to yourself the need for triple resolution, which you have managed without so far, or if you don’t urgently need video of professional recording quality, stick to the rule of reasonable need and wait until your old D700 goes to the happy hunting grounds or really justifiably stops being enough. Nikon will meanwhile prepare further tricks for you, and when buying, say, a D900, you won’t have to get rid of your very young and good eight hundred.
But if you can’t wait for the new iPhone and don’t know what to do with your money, go for the D800 head over heels 🙂 I’ll wait.
Nikon D810 –
check prices of the D800’s successor at FotoŠkoda