With dealers getting D800's out to customers today, and with DxO ranking the D800 as the best camera yet in their tests, the Web is ablaze with D800 chat.
- For those of you who pre-ordered from B&H: my understanding is that those orders are being drop shipped from Louisville. The lucky winners should be getting email notifications about that today.
- For those thinking that the D800 is better than a D4: maybe. Depends upon what you use it for. At base ISO the D800 has more dynamic range than a D4. At above ISO 1600, the D800 lags the D4 by about one stop in dynamic range. Signal to noise is nearly identical according to DxO (still doing my own tests, but I haven't found anything yet that would contradict that). But as with everything, there's no free lunch. I note a high red channel boost on the D800 and a slightly lower one on the D4, but still higher than previous cameras. This ties into an observation I made with early D4 samples: equal to the D3s but not always and sometimes different color detail. Bottom line, Nikon made the decision to boost color over letting noise propogate. I still don't know everything that means in practice, but there is no free lunch.
- Overall, both the D4 and D800 are impressive in my initial testing. Impressive enough that it may change my decision of which tool to use when.
- Lots of small details are starting to emerge. I'm not able to get the USB 3.0 capability of the D800 to work with my Mac, and neither have some others (we're stuck with USB 2.0 speeds). The D800 uses a different USB cable connector at the camera, so we've got yet another cable to add to the travel kit. Meanwhile, the standard RCA out is missing (hadn't noticed that before) on the D800, meaning you'll be using HDMI if you want video out.
- Nikon posted another technical guide for the D800 (see http://nps.nikonimaging.com/technical_solutions/), which seems to be bits and pieces from the PDF they put out. Apparently they're really worried about potential "doesn't get sharp pictures" complaints. They should be. My article the other day prompted another half dozen such complaints from D7000 users. Two of them I asked details from are on Auto Area AF, Dynamic Area AF. In other words: camera gets to decide where to focus, completely. Hmm. And they wonder why the camera didn't focus where they wanted it to?
- Warning: it appears that the original Nikon Transfer doesn't like D4 raw files. Make sure you're using the latest version of Transfer or another software product that understands D4 files for transferring. Either that or just bring them across manually.