D850 Files how much of a strain on computer?

Hi,

How much more of a strain on a PC are D850 files over 20mp files?

Thanks.

first off Welcome to the Forum.

You will need a hefty computer to handle the files from this camera. You will also have to have a lot of storage capacity. My D750 files are close to 30MB and it is only 24MP and the D850 is 45MP so I am guessing the files will be 50 to 60 MB. That will take a lot of horsepower to do any post processing.
 

Bikerbrent

Senior Member
Welcome aboard. Enjoy the ride.
We look forward to seeing more posts and samples of your work.

To answer your question, we need some information. First, what you probably really want to know is will your existing computer work OK for a D850. What camera, software and computer are you currently using? How much free hard disk space do you have? What CPU in your computer? You will need lots of disk space and a fast processor if you want to post process Raw files using something like Photoshop.
 

Bear Dale

Senior Member
Hello Don & Brent and thank you for the warm welcome, very nice.

My Canon gear - 5DMKII and a large array of L glass was stolen around 3 months ago and I have been given a cheque from the insurance company. I have an opportunity to buy whatever I want and I have never shot Nikon - I'm an enthusiastic amateur, with no lofty expectations over ever being anything else but enjoying photography for the love of it.

The D850 seems to be a wonderful camera from what I have read. I am using currently a 20mp Sony RX10III and my PC has no problems with the files nor Photoshop or LR.

Storage is easy as I can always buy more HD's.

My PC -is- getting long in the tooth though here is a paste of the specs. Do you think it will handle D850 files being 2.5x larger (roughly) than the 20mp Sony's?

Capture.JPG



Thank you kindly again for the nice welcome.
 

mikew_RIP

Senior Member
Welcome to the forum, can you convert one of your Canon raw files to Tiff, then you may have a file as large as a D850 file to play with.
 

lokatz

Senior Member
I am using currently a 20mp Sony RX10III and my PC has no problems with the files nor Photoshop or LR.
...
My PC -is- getting long in the tooth though here is a paste of the specs. Do you think it will handle D850 files being 2.5x larger (roughly) than the 20mp Sony's?

Your i5-760 is not a superfast CPU but not too bad, either. 8GB of memory will be just fine. The one info I can't get from your specs is whether your C: drive is a hard disk or an SSD. The latter will speed up almost everything you do on that computer by a substantial margin.

Much of what LR and PS do doesn't care about how large the image is. When you work on details of your image, these programs show you only that part of the image that fits on the screen anyway, so 20MP or 45MP makes no difference. Where it does make a difference is in load times (some), save times (more) and in the application of any changes that are global to the image. LR/PS, in their latest incarnations, make use of graphics card horsepower, but from what I read about it, that's still limited to a relatively small number of conversions.

My advice: if you don't have an SSD in the system yet, get one and keep the PC. You'll be more happy with it processing 45MP files than you were before with the much smaller ones.

If you already have an SSD in it, either follow mikew's advice or, if you'd like to get more accurate, scale a series of your 20MP pics up to 45MP in PS, somewhere near the D850's 8,256×5,504 native resolution, and then process them the way you usually would. That'll give you a feel for what to expect.
 

lokatz

Senior Member
Just be warned: Jared Polin always goes for the sensational. According to the manual, D850 RAW files are 41.5MB with lossless 12-bit, 51.6 with lossless 14-bit compression. I regularly convert my shots to DNG in DxO Pro before further processing, and those from my D500 are generally larger than 80MB, so I don't consider the D850's sizes much of a challenge.

Those (12-/14-bit lossless) are the only modes that make sense to me. Why anyone would want to save pics as 134.6 MB TIFFs beats me. Anyone know an argument in favor?
 

Bear Dale

Senior Member
Thank you all for the comments and thank you for the link to the D850 files, I downloaded them and PS worked with them very good and not too much of a slow down at all really.

Now I just have to decide if its the Nikon D850 body that I want or a different Nikon body and then decide on what lens's to buy.
I must admit its quite confusing browsing the Nikon lens on offer.
 
You might want to see if your computer will handle adding more memory. IF it will then the cost is not that bad, That will help speed things up. I run 24GB memory and dual SSD drives on my computer and things are quite fast.
 

Bear Dale

Senior Member
I was remiss to say that I put in an SSD drive 9 months ago, one of the best single computer improvements that I have ever done in 25+ years of computers. Boot time went from a few + minutes to around 20 seconds.
 
I was remiss to say that I put in an SSD drive 9 months ago, one of the best single computer improvements that I have ever done in 25+ years of computers. Boot time went from a few + minutes to around 20 seconds.


I added a SSD drive as my boot drive and a second SSD drive for ADOBE and my other photo applications. All photos are stored on external drives. I built this computer for photo processing only.
 

lokatz

Senior Member
Now I just have to decide if its the Nikon D850 body that I want or a different Nikon body and then decide on what lens's to buy.
I must admit its quite confusing browsing the Nikon lens on offer.

Quintrex, if the confusion continues, I'd suggest asking your fellow Nikonites for help again. That's what we're here for. :)
 
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