Here is a piece I just read and found it interesting...
D800 vs D4s For Wildlife in Low Light & Long Lenses
D800 vs D4s For Wildlife in Low Light & Long Lenses
Re comparison..
- Thread starter pedroj
- Start date
Cowleystjames
Senior Member
Great find pedroj, and that backs up my thoughts exactly.
I have D800e and a D4s, but find myself almost always using the D4s nowadays. It's just so accomplished in the autofocus department in comparison to the D800e. I can even put the TC2.0e III on my 200-400 f4 and the D4s will bang in a super sharp image at f8. The D800e obviously needs a better photog than me to get super sharp images, at a local air show recently, I had the 200-400 on the D4s and 70-200 f2.8 vrII on the D800e, both fantastic cameras in their own right along with the lenses.
However, the D4s images were outstanding, almost every one. Whilst the D800e gave me great images also, just less of them that were super sharp.
Where the D800e is better is in landscape and architecture, there the extra resolving power of the 36mp really stands out against the D4s. Perhaps that's due to the objects being static and you can take your time over focussing.
Got to come to the conclusion that the D4s is more forgiving in the focussing department along with fact the the Expeed 4 chip is just so much better than the D800e Expeed 3 item.
I have D800e and a D4s, but find myself almost always using the D4s nowadays. It's just so accomplished in the autofocus department in comparison to the D800e. I can even put the TC2.0e III on my 200-400 f4 and the D4s will bang in a super sharp image at f8. The D800e obviously needs a better photog than me to get super sharp images, at a local air show recently, I had the 200-400 on the D4s and 70-200 f2.8 vrII on the D800e, both fantastic cameras in their own right along with the lenses.
However, the D4s images were outstanding, almost every one. Whilst the D800e gave me great images also, just less of them that were super sharp.
Where the D800e is better is in landscape and architecture, there the extra resolving power of the 36mp really stands out against the D4s. Perhaps that's due to the objects being static and you can take your time over focussing.
Got to come to the conclusion that the D4s is more forgiving in the focussing department along with fact the the Expeed 4 chip is just so much better than the D800e Expeed 3 item.
I think one of the problems people have with the 800 is all that resolution. Many people complain that going from a 12mp D300 to a D800 the images are not as sharp. I did this myself initially, as the inclination is to view at 100% in Lightroom. The 800 has enough extra resolution to show any weaknesses in the photograph as taken. You are also looking at something almost twice as big.
If you down sample to 16 or 12 mp the images look a whole lot different and provide a fairer comparison. You can't view 100% images of 12, 16 and 36mp at the same distance and draw a fair comparison. Also, noise reduces a lot during this process.
I'm only saying this as it took me about a year before I understood my D800.
I'm not disagreeing that the D4 AF is superior as I'm sure it is, I'm just wondering if this is apples for apples.
What do you think about this observation?
BackdoorArts
Senior Member
It'll be interesting to see what the D800s is like since it will supposedly have the D4 AF system in it. Not that I'm planning on upgrading.
Not really. A D800 used properly can produce perfectly sharp high quality 36mp images. A D4 cannot produce images of that resolution and that's a fact. Use the D800 in other situations and it will let you know just how bad you technique was if you didn't take care. Down sample the D800 to D4 or D700 pixel size and it will look much the same as those cameras because the errors disappear when you go low res.
So in simple terms, the 800 can do things a D4 can't in the same way that the D4 can do things the D800 can't. Personally I like having the option to take the high res image and reduce or crop as it suits my purposes. Also, I don't pixel peep those 36mp images unless I know I took them properly in the first place. It's all horses for courses, but it took me a long time before I appreciated and understood what the D800 was doing for me.
We are spending 3 weeks in various US national parks and city's over the coming month. I know which camera I want for the parks and fortunately I already own it
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD,
In low light at high ISO sure the D4s will be better than the D800. Shoot in brighter light, however, and the D800 will do quite well, thank-you very much. Well sufficiently fast shutter speeds and going to say 800 ISO and below, the D4s won't be able to touch the D800. But I've also seen and reported here that the D4 is much better at focusing in low light and more accurately in reasonably good light than the D800. It will be really cool to see how the D810 compares with the D4s....I just found out from this thread that there will be a D810 so I'm very excited about that as I was planning to upgrade to a D800e so we'll see....