I've been using the new Nikon D850 for the last week after trading in the D810 which I've been using for the last 3 years. It's been a great camera for event and portrait photography although having taken 230,000 pictures it was starting to show its age!
As a former Nikon D810 user here are a few observations on the D850. It's far from a review, just a few things I've noticed from the last seven days.
- Huge improvement in autofocus. High resolution cameras are much less forgiving when it comes to focusing and so it's good to see the D5 AF system in the D850.
- Snapbridge - general pretty good although it can be a little buggy with images refusing to send.
- Silent photography at 45mp and focus peaking which makes this feature genuinely useful.
- Seems slightly quieter than the D810.
- Illuminated buttons at long last. Bizarre that this wasn't a feature on the D800/D810.
- Massive resolution. The DX crop is 5000px across. Roughly the same size as a full frame image from the D5.
- Raw files are roughly 50-60mb each (275mb uncompressed)
- No built in FTP which is a shame. Despite having wifi it's not possible to send pictures via FTP without purchasing the WT-7 which is £1000. Snapbridge allows fullsize images to be transferred but it's not particularly streamlined.
- When using DX crop mode you now get a greyed-out, shaded area around the crop area rather than the thin line on the D810. The result is it's easier to frame subjects.
- There's no built in flash which I won't miss. The flash was permanently taped down on my D810.
- Nikon are still not committing to one storage format. The D850 takes SDHC/SDXC and XQD cards. I'd much rather of seen two XQD slots.
- High ISO noise? I've not really noticed a difference which I assume is an improvement seeing as the D850 is a much higher resolution camera.
