Long-term test 33
Photography News | Issue 56 | photographynews.co.uk
Images Shot with the D850 and 24-70mm f/2.8 at 70mm and an ISO of 800 with an exposure of 1/160sec at f/3.2. processed in Lightroomwith no sharpening or noise reduction. As you can see, fine detail is very well recorded.
what it was doing. Live AF did search and evenwhen the focus zone showed green, it wasn’t spot on. Magnifying the image and manually tweaking the focus sorted that but I thought live view AF could have been more accurate and consistent. By contrast, viewfinder focusing was very good, fast and accurate, even in very flat or low lighting. The focus lever speeds up AF point navigation although it is the case that the AF area – compared with what mirrorless cameras give – is still on the small side. Strangely, I found that more consistency on the exposure system would be nice too. I used my default settings of aperture-priority and Matrix metering and usually factor in compensation based on my experience of what Matrix measurement delivers. It works for me on my other Nikons but less so on the D850. I’ll just have to recalibrate myself and get used to what the D850 delivers.
My A2 prints fromD850 Raws looked superb. Great detail, sharpness, low noise
and that is without any software interpolation, so my maximum print size of A2 59.4x42cm is within easy reach. Of course, this assumes no cropping but the truth is I crop, so some image resizing was needed to get files of the required size. Whatever the case, my A2 prints from D850 Raws, made using an Epson SC-P800 on a variety of paper surfaces, looked superb. Great detail, sharpness, low noise, lifelike colours and excellent tonality – the full house. In terms of handling, I was generally happy too. I have plenty of SD cards but did buy a 64GB XQD card as a backup. Usually I would reformat theXQDcard for thenext day once files were backed up from the SD
card. Given my needs, a dual slot SD card optionwould have been ideal. Battery life of the supplied EN- EL15a cell was impressive. I was shooting all day – and into the night – in sub-zero temperatures in Norway, getting 600 plus normal shots and still the battery showed half power at day’s end. I had a spare and did need it a couple of times when I had been doing a lot of extreme long exposures. I loved the tiltable touch monitor as I like low-level shooting and it did make life so much more comfortable. I used it a great deal, even when tripod shooting at standing height for composing and for live view AF too. One thing I did learn about the D850’s live AF was to double check
Before
After
Summary
Pros Image quality, tiltable touch monitor, build quality, quiet shutter, battery life, focus stacking feature Cons Live view AF could be more better and more consistent The Nikon D850 is a £3499 body only camera so it is a seriously priced, top-end camera. But it does offer a highly capable performance and a worthwhile uplift for existing D800/810 users.
Above Shoot Raws and you would expect the ability to tweak highlights and shadows, and you certainly get that with the 14-bit files from the Nikon D850. You still have to be careful with extreme highlights to avoid veiling.
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