Mastering The Nikon D850

[Ena Marklund]

Afterthree months of waiting, I finally got not just one but two Nikon D850 camera bodies and the Nikon MB-D18 battery grip that goes along with the Nikon D850. My thanks to Roberts Camera and B&H Photo for getting me those two D850s. Having put my order in only one day after the camera was announced, you can tell just how popular this new Nikon has been. There is still huge demand for the Nikon D850.

From the first moment I picked up the camera it felt great in the hand. I have large hands so the deep grip on the D850 fits really well. Ditto for the MB-D18 battery grip. The pull out LCD on the back of the camera is also a welcome change. I am not sure why it took so long to add a movable LCD onto the back of pro cameras but there are plenty of times that it comes in handy. The touchscreen LCD and touchscreen menus is also a huge time saver. The first time I saw the scroll bar to go through images my mind was blown. Any other method to scroll through images seems crazy now. Also, the touch menu layout is massively faster than pushing buttons and dials. I can change setups in less than half the time using the touchscreen menu options. These last two tweaks really made going back to the D810 or the D4 painful.

In tests against my Hasselblad H5D 50c WiFi, the D850 faired extremely well against the much more expensive Hasselblad. In the center, the images were almost identically sharp when comparing an ISO 64 D850 file against an ISO 100 H5D image file. The H5D image was cleaner overall in terms of noise but that is to be expected. As shown in the screenshot below, where the H5D really outshines the D850 is in the corners. The D850 (on the left) was noticeably softer in the corners than the Hasselblad H5D (on the right). For this comparison no sharpening was applied to either image. I realize comparing the D850 to a top-end medium format camera costing nearly five times as much as the D850 seems a bit overkill but many will be wondering just how well it does in this category. Note that in this test I chose an aperture of f/8 for the D850 and an aperture of f/11 for the H5D giving an approximately similar depth of field. The Nikon D850 had the excellent Nikkor AF-S 85mm f/1.4G lens on it and the Hasselblad has the remarkable HC 100mm f/2.2 lens attached to it, which is a very similar field of view as the Nikon 85mm lens.

For landscape photography, Nikon has done an excellent job reducing the shutter bounce and vibration in the D850. But, with that said, you will need to lock this puppy down on a serious tripod if you expect to get tack-sharp images at any shutter speed below 1/125th second. And by serious, I mean a beefy heavy duty tripod. None of those wimpy tripods with extendable top tubes need apply. I use the same Gitzo GT5541LS tripod that I use with my Hasselblad when shooting landscapes with the D850, and I also use a large ballhead to make sure everything is locked down tightly. For the best results, just as with my D810, I also use the mirror up option along with Exposure Delay mode (3s) and the Electronic front-curtain shutter mode to eliminate any vibration.

Over the last month since I got the camera, I was doing a few demos for Elinchrom with their new ELB 1200 battery-powered strobe kit. For the first two demos, both done in a studio setting, I used my Nikon D810 and even with the modeling lights on the camera had some difficulty tracking the athletes we hired to do a variety of martial arts maneuvers. I used the D850 for the last demo and it had no difficulty whatsoever tracking wild movements in the studio as can be seen below. This image was created using the 3D Tracking AF mode. When I shot with the D5, the 3D tracking AF mode seemed like it could read your mind and kept whatever you locked onto tack sharp even with extremely fast moving subjects. The D850 seems to do incredibly well with the 3D Tracking AF mode as well, and this will come in handy for recomposing while tracking fast moving subjects.

As with the D810, I highly recommend fine tuning the AF for each lens you own and use. With the D850, it is quite a bit easier to fine tune the AF for each lens than it was with the D810 because Nikon has included an AF fine tune option in the D850 as they did with the D5 and D500. PetaPixel posted a great article entitled How to Use Auto AF Fine Tune on Your Nikon DSLR the Right Way. I highly recommend watching this video and dialing in the AF Fine Tune settings for all your lenses. This will make the AF much more accurate.

As can bee seen in the image above, the D850 has excellent dynamic range. For this image, shot on the Torre atop the Serra da Estrela mountain range in central Portugal, I exposed for the bright sky and then pulled up the shadows in the mountains. At ISO 64 the D850 has nearly 15 stops of dynamic range which is among the best of any cameras out there and comes close to rivaling the best medium format cameras.

When I purchase a new camera, one of the standard tests I run on it is a still life shoot at every ISO setting to see just how much noise builds up as I crank up the ISO settings. Since I work in a wide variety of situations knowing just how far I can push the ISO is critical to making sure I come back with the images. With the D810 and now the D850, knowing how much noise is created at various ISOs is even more important because if I am shooting handheld I will likely be working at ISO 400 and above quite often just to get the fast shutter speeds required for tack-sharp images. I know this part of the review will be a bit on the geeky side, but as a pro you have to know your gear.

Now, comparing the D850 to the Nikon D4, we see that the D4 is still a much cleaner file. In the screenshot below the D850 is on the left and the D4 is on the right. Both images were shot at ISO 6400. The D4 image file is ultra clean at ISO 6400. Because the D4 creates a 16 MP file it is much smaller than the 46 MP D850 file. The size difference here also makes it hard to tell how they would appear in a similar size print.

Now, for the final comparison, in the screenshot below we have the D850 on the left and the Hasselblad H5D 50c WiFi on the right. Both were shot at ISO 6400 with approximately the same focal length lens. As you can clearly see, the H5D image file is ridiculously clean at ISO 6400. The D850 file is much noisier. The color fidelity of the H5D image file is also a lot nicer but that is mainly due to the 16-bit image processing pipeline in the H5D. Still, the D850 did quite well in this stress test.

Those extra two frames per second come at a steep price. The price of the MB-D18 Battery Grip is $399.95 USD just for the grip. To actually allow the D850 to get up to 9 fps you will also need the Nikon EN-EL18b battery (the one used for the Nikon D5 or D4, which goes for $149 USD) and the BL-5 Battery Chamber Cover (another $24.95 USD) to hold that larger battery in the grip. You will also need the Nikon NH-26aAK battery Charger to charge those larger size batteries and that charger is rather pricey at $369.95 USD. Adding that all up, to get to 9 fps you will have to spend an additional $943.85 USD. That is unless you already own a Nikon D4 or D5, in which case you will already have the batteries and the battery charger. Needless to say, that is a lot of money to gain a few extra frames per second.

Of course, if you have your camera set up to shoot to both the XQD card and the SD card for backup, the buffer is even shorter than those specs listed above. If you want the fastest write speeds you will need to buy the fastest XQD cards on the market from Sony. We will get to that in the next section.

To get the best performance out of the D850, choosing the right memory card, and specifically the best XQD card is a huge factor. The XQD memory card format has gotten a bad rep for some reason. I am not sure why. In my experience using pretty much every memory card format on the market the XQD cards are the best out there and they are my personal favorites. They are smaller than CompactFlash cards, large than SD cards and are tougher than both. They are also not as fragile as the CFast cards and they are faster than any CFast card on the market. I really hope they are adopted by more camera manufacturers because they are the memory card format of the future. I think most photographers groaned about the XQD cards because it meant they had to buy new memory cards.

With the D850 and the Hasselblad H5D 50c WiFi, all of my cameras (save for the GoPros) are at 46MP or 50 MP. I have become an addict to high resolution cameras because the resulting images print incredibly well. With the 36 MP D810, I could print those images up to five feet (1.5 meters) long and they looked spectacular. With the D850 I can go even larger. Aside from the print resolution, the D850 also allows clients to take vertical crops out of horizontal images, which is a great feature when it comes to publishing ads in magazines or for magazine covers.

I have been reading about the demise of the SLR for many years, yet it remains with us. I fell for the SLR way back in 1959 and it has been my favorite ever since. Even though, over the years, I made good use of other types of cameras, including the wonderful Leica rangefinder models and medium format cameras, the SLR remained my goto camera. Now, at 81, I am anxiously waiting for the shipment of my D850.

i just came across this article and i also own a nikon d850 as well as a hasselblad h3dll-22 camera. for your surf images the d850 imho reigns supreme, as well as for most action shots or wildlife photography. when i look at your image of the ropes, the compared images my be technically equal but i see more of a 3D look with the hasselblad. i did a similar test with my hasselblad and 80mm lens against my d850 with my zeiss otus 85mm lens. both were shot wide open. the test subject was my grand daughters doll. the nikon with otus lens blew away, sharpness wise, the hasselblad but the roll off of values particularly on the dolls face gave a much better 3D look with the hasselblad image. everyone i showed the compared images to, picked the hasselblad over the d850 even though the d850 was so much sharper. sometimes i think today that sharpness has become the bar for a good image. i believe we should also be looking at transition of tones and maybe 16 bit vs 14 bit does has value in the transition of tones.

3a8082e126