D810 vs D750?

[gqtuazon]

I just bought a D750 and so far I'm very satisfied! Nice camera! My question is... what are the main difference between the D810 and D750? I know the sensor size is different, but the lens are the same (FX). So in the real world, what would be the advantage of the D810? I do not shoot video at all (other than some obligatory grandkid stuff). I do mostly still photography, so would it have made more sense for me to have purchased the D810? Just curious since the price difference isn't all that much. Thanks.

Congrats on your new camera Jim. I kinda like the D750 since the read LCD works well for my video needs. It should be a great tool to get whatever you might throw at it.

It's still raining which is a bit annoying since I can't shoot the new cam. So I grabbed the macro and did some quick shots. It'll take more to do a full comparison. DoF is thin so a mm makes a lot of difference. All shot processed identical but no sharpening or noise reduction. All shots are scaled to the same sized JPEG. D750 is shot in sRGB, the D810 in aRGB. All focus at max in Live.

As you see the differences are not massive. I could however have cropped the D810 some 20% more and keep the same quality. Its detail is slightly better which is purely pixel size related but it'll show noise a bit sooner too. Another difference is that at ISO 100 I'll have shadow improvement which will not start before some 300 for the D750. Around ISO 200 the D810 has more than the D750 gets even in the high ISOs. But again, that's not something that jumps out when you look at a shot.

Great comparison and analysis. Both displays superb clarity and image quality. Can't go wrong with these cameras.

 

[J-see]

Finally a bit better weather. I've been shooting the 810 with the 70-200mm to get enough light to the sensor. I still need to fine-tune the AF and just tried some values to check in post.

The D810 is heavier and I quickly feel the difference compared to the D750. The buttons require some searching at start but since I'm a very basic shooter when it comes to settings, it turns out to be not that much of a problem. The buttons of the D810 are better for my kind of shooting than those of the D750. They should have removed all the crap buttons and settings of the D750 too.

Shooting and focus seems to be identical as the D750 although the focus points are wider spaced which could provide better results. Time will tell. The D810 likes batteries and I will never get the same shots as the D750. A good thing I already got four of them.

The best thing about it: it's oh so quiet...it's oh so still...

I looooove that.

As I discovered when starving the sensor yesterday; it can not be pushed as hard as the D750. It does not do that well during low light and it has more noise during conversion. I will never be able to shoot it as crazy as the D750 allows me. This is really a cam that performs best when shot as it should be; loads of light, lowest ISO possible. Then it performs wonderful. It's a perfect slow cam.



Now to find out how to best process its RAW.

 

[J-see]

I've been shooting the Tam 150-600mm on the D810 and can't say it makes any difference to the D750 when it comes to shooting. If there is a difference in focus speed it is that small I don't notice it.

I usually shoot the D750 at ISO 100 underexposed up to five stops and I can get good shots without a problem. I can't do the same with the D810 and even at 3 stops underexposed, it starts to show in the shots. The D750 does much, much better during low light. Certainly with my shooting style.

The D810 wins when it comes to colors. It has close to a bit more color sensitivity and only after seeing the first shots, I fully realized what 1 bit implies. It's also sharper and makes the shots of my Tamron look like the lens is suddenly worth twice the price. When I up the ISO, the color sensitivity goes down and won't be that different of the D750 but the detail difference will remain.

The RAW format also makes a lot of difference for birding. A 20% larger RAW is 20% more crop. It's as if I'm now shooting a 1.2x crop when compared to the D750. The file size difference however is not something beneficial. I use lossless compressed now which is some 36-40Mb each but when you get back home with 100-200 shots, that size difference starts to become a PITA.

It slows everything down, requires more memory, takes more time in editors since they first need to un-compress them and then do every calculation on pretty massive files. Large formats are interesting, large file sizes not as much.


Up to now both cams can be considered equals. Each of them specialized in something specific and thus better than the other at that but at all the rest; not too different.

Both are worth the money.


If Nikon added the best of both into a new FX, that would be something else.

 

[J-see]

Some more differences:

Today I was testing whether or not to use ISO and what made me frown was that a by one stop underexposed shot taken at ISO 800 showed noise in the lighter areas of the shot. It appears that if I shoot without ISO and normalise the exposure in post, I get cleaner results than when using ISO and let the cam do the amplification. At least at lower ISO. For the D750 both approaches lead to close to similar results. That there is more noise in the D810 doesn't surprise me but that the middle tones suffer does.

It's easily fixed in post but that it shows that soon is a bit disappointing. The full well capacity of the D810 pixels isn't that much smaller but apparently it does not do a that good job during the read-out or manipulation as the D750 does.

For focus tracking the D810 seems to result in more hits than the D750 when shooting bursts and I suspect the wider spaced focal points have something to do with it. When light gets low that'll probably work against me and then the D750 will do better.

There are more differences than I expected but about all are small.

No processing:

 

[J-see]

Here's a shot of my second walk.

It's not the exact same aperture but it's close. Shot at 64 ISO and normalised the exposure in post. No other processing.