D800 is incredibly good!

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Stany Buyle
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D800 is incredibly good!

Post by Stany Buyle »

The story: I'm actually testing my D800 in all kind of situations and with all kind of lenses and lens combinations. Most of the pictures I take right now have no other purpose than test. I want to know what I can expect from the camera in all kind of shooting situations. Related to this I did some occasional portraiture at resp iso 6400, 12800 and 25600. You can see those pictures here. Of course I'm not going to do portraiture at such high iso, but I just wanted to know...

After work I planned to go out for shooting some birds in flight with my 70-200VRII + 2xTCIIIe combo, a combo which gave me excellent results on my D700.

Arrived at place of action sun was a little too low already and against what I normally would do, I had to crank up the iso to 800 and even to iso 1600 for some other shots. But while light was basically perfect and the birds were surfing slowly on the wind I had high expectations anyhow.

I was taking approx 60 bird-in-flight pictures till the icecold wind forced me into my car... Sun was down under while anyhow, no much keepers to go for anymore.

Back in my car and looking at the screen I clicked on image properties and OMG, my camera was set to "jpeg basic S" (3680px x 2456px) because yesterday evening I tested the HDR function.
"Everything ruined" I thought and with a bad temper because of my own stupidity I drove home.

Expecting nothing worth a look because of jpeg S-basic setting and no possibilities for some decent post processing I downloaded the images on my card to my PC anyhow.
I opened one file, hmmm, "much better than I expected" , one more file... getting excited.., ten more files, very excited, 50 more files... All of the files showed an IQ that I never considered as possible when you shoot in jpeg S basic. Nice sharpness, tonality, DR and colours straight OOC... Also the metering of all shots was perfect. Up to that the file size amazed me, finally a jpeg S-basic out of a D800 is close to the biggest size of a D200 those days...

Upto that, another very welcome surprise is that all files, yes -all files- are perfect in focus with even decent sharpness for the worst ones... Not something everybody expects while shooting with a 2xTC in combination with a zoom lens.

I posted here underneath one of the better files with crops and 100% crop to back up my excitement.

D800 is an incredible camera...
Thanks and congratulations to the Nikon engineering team.
Compared to former models like D3x, -even with a possible €250 price increase-, this camera maintains a bargain for what you get.

xxx

The scene, downsized to 1024px longest side to fit on this forum.
This picture was taken with D800 and 70-200VRII + 2xTCIIIe at 400mm, handhold(in strong wind), VR on, iso 800, F5.6, 1/800 sec in jpeg S basic. Picture style set at "standard".
As only post processing action next to resizing I did a little local sharpening around the eye in Nikon Capture NX2.3.1.

Image

A 63% crop, downsized as well to 1024px longest side to fit on this forum.
Image

And a 100% crop of the original jpeg S basic file. (3680px x 2456px)
Image

Exif of the above picture:
Image
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Thanks for your attention and kindest regards,
Stany
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