I, for one, am glad they didn't. My original ship date from Amazon was early November. Then it got bumped to mid-December. I started looking around for someplace else that might be able to ship it faster, and placed a second order. Then, a few weeks ago, Amazon moved my date forward again. It unexpectedly shipped ahead of even that new date and I received it about two weeks ago. I was a D800e shooter before, and the D850 feels pretty much at home in my hand. It's a little bit blockier and maybe a touch heavier, but most of the controls are in the same places and I've had no problem adjusting for what little has changed. Mostly, the stuff that changed is not the stuff you worry about while shooting. The larger touch screen is nice. I wish I could tell you the XQD cards were great, but I'm still waiting. 128Gb and above are super hard to find right now, so I'm just shooting to SD.
The pictures from it are pretty amazing. SO MANY PIXELS. It feels like the new RAW format the D850 uses captures more information. I had a shot where the strobes didn't fire in a dark room with almost no ambient light, and I was able to pull a halfway decent image out of it. Bonkers. It must have been 10 stops underexposed at least. The shot won't win any awards, but it's decent.
Because they use a new RAW format in the D850, not all software recognizes it yet. All of Adobe's stuff does, of course, but you have to be on the most current version. Affinity Photo, which I like to use sometime to edit photos on my iPad, still does not recognize the new RAW format. Also, because the images are so big, my first generation iPad Pro struggles a bit when doing editing of any complexity with multiple layers.
The waiting was tough, but it was every bit worth the wait once it got here. It completely lives up to the hype. What few complaints I had about the 800e are completely gone with the D850 and there's a bunch of stuff I wouldn't have even thought to ask for. Hang in there!
