Before I start, this is not a knocking the D800 thread. I have posted because I was surprised that I couldn't convince myself to get one at the moment, and I'm the sort of person that would normally find that easy.
The other day I was in Jessops and noticed that the Nikon D800 had dropped to £2100. The technical me wanted one as it would obviously improve my photography with all those pixies. I rushed home and did my usual thing; I put everything in a spreadsheet and calculated the cost of change (From my D300s with a mix of DX and FX glass). By the time I'd bought the body, changed various lenses and upgraded my PC to handle the images I would be looking at around £5000. This would put me in a similar position lens wise, and allow me to post process / view the images as I can now
I know this is a lot of money, but heck my art would be sooo much better as a result of the increased dynamic range, high ISO low noise, lots of pixies etc etc
Having looked at the financial impact I then looked at the pros and cons (the D800 is not all pros). I scored the features and issues of the D800 against my D300s. In my very subjective test the D800 only just won in terms of what I want out of a camera. For example, going from 7 to 4 frames per second would cause me an issue. Not being able to import large images into my IPAD for review would really hurt (I would like to confirm this point, maybe someone here can confirm if it's possible to imort and view RAW files). If I didn't get more disciplined (Tripod more often) would I see a degradation in some images? Even if all of these issues went away, would it improve my images to the tune of five grand? My conclusion is that I'll stick with the D300s for now as it's a fine camera and concentrate on my composition /discipline. I'm not saying that I won't upgrade in the future, possibly even next year, but it certainly wasn't the cut and dry case that I expected. In reality Nikon don't currently make a camera that meets what I want. I'm sure many people are getting fantastic results with the D800, but what I probably want is a 24 megapixel D400 (A pro body / feature set DX) and Nikon may never make that
I even looked at Canon (Don't tell anyone) but they didn't seem to have what I was looking for either.
Please don't try to counter this post with the image quality arguments as I know them and considered them in my scoring. I just know that I have not approached what my D300s can do so the problem is probably not the sensor
The other day I was in Jessops and noticed that the Nikon D800 had dropped to £2100. The technical me wanted one as it would obviously improve my photography with all those pixies. I rushed home and did my usual thing; I put everything in a spreadsheet and calculated the cost of change (From my D300s with a mix of DX and FX glass). By the time I'd bought the body, changed various lenses and upgraded my PC to handle the images I would be looking at around £5000. This would put me in a similar position lens wise, and allow me to post process / view the images as I can now
Having looked at the financial impact I then looked at the pros and cons (the D800 is not all pros). I scored the features and issues of the D800 against my D300s. In my very subjective test the D800 only just won in terms of what I want out of a camera. For example, going from 7 to 4 frames per second would cause me an issue. Not being able to import large images into my IPAD for review would really hurt (I would like to confirm this point, maybe someone here can confirm if it's possible to imort and view RAW files). If I didn't get more disciplined (Tripod more often) would I see a degradation in some images? Even if all of these issues went away, would it improve my images to the tune of five grand? My conclusion is that I'll stick with the D300s for now as it's a fine camera and concentrate on my composition /discipline. I'm not saying that I won't upgrade in the future, possibly even next year, but it certainly wasn't the cut and dry case that I expected. In reality Nikon don't currently make a camera that meets what I want. I'm sure many people are getting fantastic results with the D800, but what I probably want is a 24 megapixel D400 (A pro body / feature set DX) and Nikon may never make that
Please don't try to counter this post with the image quality arguments as I know them and considered them in my scoring. I just know that I have not approached what my D300s can do so the problem is probably not the sensor