Replacement for D300s

[BeBu Lamar]

I absolutely love my D800, and in fact even though I haven't had it that long I paid a bit of a premium since I bought it just before the D850 was announced.

 

With that said, I'm not sure if it's the best camera for someone who wants to shoot sports and birds. The AF is plenty fast for me for most of my photography, but I still find it slower than a D300/MB-D10/EN-EL4. The frame rate is also much lower. The D500 is tremendously better in both of these respects.

 

There's also the crop factor aspect, which of course can be advantageous both for sports and wildlife. A D800 is no slouch when cropped to DX sizes(16mp or so, I think), but the D500 is still higher resolution than any FX camera in DX crop mode(the D850 is hair-splitting close at 19.6).

 

Really? The price of the D800 has dropped since the announcement of the D850? I thought it has dropped a long time ago and now the price is more condition dependent than because of the introduction of the D850.

[CvhKaar]

You're the exception, cpm - but sorry for maligning you!

 

In which case, in your professional opinion, how much harder is Nikon making a camera WiFi connection look, compared with how it should?

 

...

 

Nikon makes it much to hard by combining Bleutooth and Wi-Fi without leaving the choice to the user of the camera.

I also own a "basic"canon camera which gives me several choices for connecting; it can function as a "hotSpot / accespoint" by itself, but can also be connected to a "home Network" through Wi-Fi. An elegant and easy to use solution.

 

Looking at the Nikon Solution, it looks like Nikon utilises some kind of ESP32 like chip, which combines Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE on 1 chip ( google it for more info)

reprogramming that chip is not hard, but tsince the program for that chip is part of the camera's software infrastructure it is quit a task if one would split the functionalities in a way that makes Wi-Fi available by itself without knowing the restof the software in the camera .. ( hard but probably not impossible if you have the right documentation available..)

[ShunCheung]

I have had a D800E since shortly after it was introduced back in 2012. It is still an excellent camera for landscape, studio, etc. although it has been superseded by the D810 and now D850. However, the D800 maxes out at 4 fps for FX. That wouldn't be my choice for sports and wildlife.

 

And since 2012 (and even before), I have been buying and using some very new models of Nikon DSLRs, and I haven't experienced any issue that people are complaining about on the web, such as the D800's AF issue, D750 shutter .... My D750 had a bad GPS connection that Nikon fixed under warranty. A loaner D810 had some electronic issues that led to corrupted images, but a replacement was just fine. Those are more like isolated problems.

 

I have used two D500 extensively, and the one I own, I have had it for over a year without issues. That would be my choice for sports and wildlife if the OP wants to stay with DX.

[Andrew Garrard]

Nikon makes it much to hard by combining Bleutooth and Wi-Fi without leaving the choice to the user of the camera.

I also own a "basic"canon camera which gives me several choices for connecting; it can function as a "hotSpot / accespoint" by itself, but can also be connected to a "home Network" through Wi-Fi. An elegant and easy to use solution.

 

Yes. I believe the top-end EyeFi gives you the same choice. Given the flexibility of most cell phones and all computers these days, it's not clear to me that Nikon's attempt to automate the process (or run a crippled app) is in any way helping.

 

Looking at the Nikon Solution, it looks like Nikon utilises some kind of ESP32 like chip, which combines Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE on 1 chip ( google it for more info)

reprogramming that chip is not hard, but since the program for that chip is part of the camera's software infrastructure it is quite a task if one would split the functionalities in a way that makes Wi-Fi available by itself without knowing the rest of the software in the camera .. ( hard but probably not impossible if you have the right documentation available..)

 

Alas, I wasn't suggesting we/you hack the firmware to fix it. I saw one comment (possibly from Thom?) suggesting that Nikon may have a tiny firmware size limit despite running through many camera designs, and this might limit their ability to add goodies. I really hope that's not true; even if it is, you can (almost) always optimise more. I'd love to be allowed at Nikon's source code for a couple of weeks. But assuming that whoever's programming the thing already has access to the source, it still feels like they've somehow - at least allowing for the number of revisions Snapbridge has gone through - managed to make far more of a meal of developing a usable system than they needed to.

 

I'm generously assuming they didn't deliberately cripple things to try to sell the WT-7, which is ridiculously expensive (£1100 in the UK). You could build something Raspberry Pi-based that plugged into the USB port for a tenth of that, which worked better, and was smaller.

[Andrew Garrard]

Btw, did everyone know about Nikon putting the D850 manual online in HTML form? I'm used to the PDF, but unless I missed them doing it before, this is new.

 

In 2016 I went to a number of scenic places, including Yellowstone, with a D810 and hired D500 (between me and my wife, but also for backup). The megapixels and dynamic range of the D810 got used for landscape, but except for the Yellowstone specific "yet another bison" images where I was very close, the D500's frame rate and reach were much more useful. I only took my D810 on a more recent trip (because of logistics), and every bit of reach would have helped (compared with my 200-500 + TC14 combo). Sometimes you have enough glass and it's nice to have a wider view, but DX is mostly the affordable way for wildlife unless you're good at getting close.

 

I've never bothered with the grip for the D8x0 series (I may do for the D850 because it doesn't kill the resolution to hit frame rate), but I've used the 1.2x crop mode on the D800 and D810 to get an extra fps (5 and 6 respectively). That's handy for wildlife, and it's still about 25MP, with a bigger buffer than a D750.

[Mary Doo]

Btw, did everyone know about Nikon putting the D850 manual online in HTML form? I'm used to the PDF, but unless I missed them doing it before, this is new.

 

400 pages of D850 pdf here.

[ben_hutcherson]

Really? The price of the D800 has dropped since the announcement of the D850? I thought it has dropped a long time ago and now the price is more condition dependent than because of the introduction of the D850.

 

In the US, a "typical" D800 in less than perfect condition(but still nice) with a shutter count in the 25000-75000 range was around $1300. Since D850 has shipped, I've seen cameras in that general category slide to around $1000.

 

KEH is still holding at $1300, but at least one local shop has marked all of the ones in their used case down to $995 and they're still not moving. They've also had a fair few show up since the D850 shipped, and again these are going in at $995 typically. There's one REALLY nice one that looks brand new and has 5,000 actuations for $1100.

[Andrew Garrard]

400 pages of D850 pdf here.

 

Yes, I know - I have it (and a load of other camera manual PDFs) downloaded, which is how I'm sometimes able to pretend I know things.

 

The HTML version I linked to seems to be new, though. It's potentially useful to those of us here pointing people at documentation - partly because it's chunked into sub-pages, which makes it a little easier to point people at subsections. (E.g. here's the "touch photography" section.) I still absolutely want the PDF, partly for offline viewing and partly because it's much easier to search it, but I thought the HTML version may also be useful.

 

(Btw, does anyone else find the new photo.net way of showing links - almost invisibly - to be unhelpful? I remember the good old days when you could rely on blue text and an underscore to tell you where a link was. If you missed it above, here's the HTML version I was referring to.)

[Dieter Schaefer]

does anyone else find the new photo.net way of showing links - almost invisibly - to be unhelpful?

To the extreme! I miss most of them if there isn't an announcement to its existence in the thread - and even then have to look pretty hard (like the one you posted that I totally didn't realize was a link). Should be an easy thing for photo.net to fix. Coulda, shoulda, woulda - but won't.

[Mary Doo]

(Btw, does anyone else find the new photo.net way of showing links - almost invisibly - to be unhelpful?

 

Very unhelpful. Don't know why they are not correcting this glaring dysfunction. That's why I always manually bolden and change the link color to blue.

Edited November 28, 2017 by Mary Doo

[Dieter Schaefer]

Don't know why they are not correcting this glaring dysfunction.

"Top-tier programmers" employed by photo.net don't know how? And can't make the time to find out?

[Mary Doo]

"Top-tier programmers" employed by photo.net don't know how? And can't make the time to find out?

Should be a very easy thing to do; in many cases the software automatically makes it to whatever color when it knows it's a hyperlink if the defaults or preferences are set.

[Andrew Garrard]

You'd hope there's just a style sheet somewhere that could be changed.

 

Oh well, thanks for the suggestion, Mary. I'll get into the habit of restyling my links!

[georges_walker]

I shoot a lot of sports and a mish-mash of birds, landscapes, macros, some portraits, etc. I've always loved my D300 and D300s, but am ready to upgrade to something with the SAME BODY, but with more bells and whistles such as bluetooth and/or wifi accessibility (and a higher ISO). I only shoot on manual, so the D300 body has a great layout (no fumbling around in Menu to change the shutter, ISO, WB, or to to bracket). What would be a good replacement? (Note: I'm not a pro and a $4,000 camera is way out of my budget.) Any direction would be greatly appreciated.

 

Hi, I also have D300 and D300s, around 6 prime lenses and only one DX zoom. In my case I'm ready to move to the new D850, I rather prefer working with a better body in the FX format and taking better advantages from my prime lenses. Another key point I'm having in mind, is the technology available already from Nikon. Having said this, I could suggest you moving to a FX body and take full advantage of the high resolution a FX body may provide.

[ben_hutcherson]

In my case I'm ready to move to the new D850, I rather prefer working with a better body in the FX format and taking better advantages from my prime lenses

 

Short of some super-teles many Nikkor primes are now somewhat older designs and are beginning to show their age and deficiencies on D8x0 series bodies. As an example, the 14-24 2.8 is sharper than the 14mm 2.8 and pretty much every other lens it directly takes the place of.

 

As a former prime snob, I mostly consider mid-range primes due to speed, not due to their optical performance. In many cases, the high end zooms are just better.

 

My 14-24 stays parked at 14mm most of the time, but I still am happy I spent the extra money on it vs. the 14mm 2.8D prime.

 

Aside from that, if you want fast handling comparable to a D500, which the OPs requirements indicate, you really need a D5 in FX. As I said previously, I love my D800 but it's still slower than my D300/MB-D10/EN-EL4. That's fine for me 99% of the time, but it sounds like it won't be for the OP.

[Gary Naka]

LP

What kind of sports do you shoot?

The sport and shooting location will drive the gear.

 

Example, I did not think of tennis as a LONG lens sport. But I had to resort to a 500mm lens (on a D7200 DX body) to shoot across 5 courts to #6, the 300mm did not have enough reach. And when you NEED to reach, a DX body gives you the 1.5x crop advantage. So that 500mm lens on my DX body is like a 750mm lens on a FX body.