Need advise, crop body or teleconverter

snj979s

Senior Member
I've been shooting with a full frame d800 and Nikon's 200-500mm. Looking to get some extra reach. Should I get a good crop body or a teleconverter? ty
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
I've been shooting with a full frame d800 and Nikon's 200-500mm. Looking to get some extra reach. Should I get a good crop body or a teleconverter? ty

How much "more reach" do you want? I'd explore the available teleconverters. My 1.4 tele pushes my 200-500 to 700 and a minimum aperture of F8... The Kenko 1.4X Pro 300 is less than $150 and the 2X is $170. The Nikon Teleconverters start at $500.

DX mode isn't going to do anything except reduce your avail pixels. It'll be the same as using full frame and just cropping your final image.
 

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
Getting a DX body really won't offer you much more than you've got with your D800's higher megapixels (after you crop an image). Like Fred mentioned, you can try a 1.4x teleconverter. You will lose 1-stop making your aperture f/8. I'd be afraid of opting for a 2x teleconverter because you might wind up with the AF having trouble locking focus.

The Nikon teleconverters will be much better in terms of sharpness than Kenko. I purchased my Nikon 1.4x teleconverter as preowned - no issues with it at all on my D7200.
 

Sudipto

Senior Member
Never go down to dx it is totally loss. I made the mistake and suffering right now. I was shooting with D7100 then bought D750 and based on YouTube reports bought D500. My pictures with D750 was much much better and got a lot of appreciation. But with D500 the noise buster, merely my subject focus rate is increased with a lot of deterioration of quality. Now when I placed the camera for sell to go back to fx there is no buyer. I think I have to sell it at last at a through away price and reinvest a large amount for fx once again. I am highly dissatisfied with Nikon dx.


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mikew_RIP

Senior Member
Never go down to dx it is totally loss. I made the mistake and suffering right now. I was shooting with D7100 then bought D750 and based on YouTube reports bought D500. My pictures with D750 was much much better and got a lot of appreciation. But with D500 the noise buster, merely my subject focus rate is increased with a lot of deterioration of quality. Now when I placed the camera for sell to go back to fx there is no buyer. I think I have to sell it at last at a through away price and reinvest a large amount for fx once again. I am highly dissatisfied with Nikon dx.


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Nothing wrong with DX as such, it sounds like you made the wrong decision for your subject matter and shooting situation, hope you get back to what you want.
 

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
Never go down to dx it is totally loss. I made the mistake and suffering right now. I was shooting with D7100 then bought D750 and based on YouTube reports bought D500. My pictures with D750 was much much better and got a lot of appreciation. But with D500 the noise buster, merely my subject focus rate is increased with a lot of deterioration of quality. Now when I placed the camera for sell to go back to fx there is no buyer. I think I have to sell it at last at a through away price and reinvest a large amount for fx once again. I am highly dissatisfied with Nikon dx.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I do some immense crops with my D610 and still wind up with less noise than when shooting with DX. So yes, there seems to be a difference - although I don't have a D500 for the best comparison.
 

STM

Senior Member
Getting a crop sensor body is much preferable to using a TC. There is no loss in IQ or loss of f/ by going to a crop sensor. I use my D850 most of the time but when I need more "reach" I use the D500. It is great having a 900mm f/4! I do not see a noticeable increase in noise with the D500 over my D850. Both have very low noise levels below ISO 800
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
I shoot a lot of wildlife so reach is very important. Maybe the best way to answer your question is to recount my journey.

I started with a D7000 and a D90 in 2011 and quickly started leaning towards wildlife and birds in particular. I wanted to upgrade after 18 months or so and had to decide between the D7100 (more MPs) or the D800 which had more MPs in full frame and the same 16MPs as my D7000 in DX mode. I opted for the D800. Big mistake. Long story short, shooting in full frame made for HUGE raw files that quickly filled my hard drive even though I was cropping out huge portions of them, but I found shooting in DX mode almost impossible because the viewfinder doesn't change, you only get a box in the center that you have to keep your subject in - easy for anything standing still but a major PITA for birds in flight, of which I shot a lot. After 9 months I bought a refurb D7100, converted the D800 to infrared, and was happy as a lark.

I own a D610, D750, and a pair of D500's. The D500's are my wildlife cameras, period. I see what I'm shooting and it adds 50% to my reach. A Teleconverter fixes nothing, and could diminish both image quality and focus ability (that said, I regularly add a 1.4x to my 300mm with good results). If I'm shooting wildlife with a DSLR I will always shoot with a cropped sensor camera. It's obvious some of the people above don't agree with me, but I'd never call moving to a DX a "step down". There's a right tool for every job, which is why you don't see roofers swinging framing hammers (not that you see a roofer actually swing a hammer any more). The guy stressing the noise difference between the D750 and D500 is right to some extent (it's about 1 full stop "worse), but he's getting 9.6MPs in the area I'm shooting 20MPs, so who do you think is going to get enough of that bird in a bush to have a photo that they have to worry about noise in to begin with?

Since you're shooting with a D800, if you picked any of the D7xxx cameras currently produced you'd get a pretty significant bump in megapixels over the D800 in cropped mode, and more MP's give you more pixels per bird so cropping in would be improved. A D500 gives you less of a bump (16MP to 20MP) but you get more FPS and a greatly improved focusing system. Either way, for wildlife a cropped sensor camera would (IMHO) be a step up from what you have. The TC will help but only on a subset of lenses so make sure you check before trying. They're another tool, but not a miracle cure.

That said, I am waiting for the next full frame mirrorless with great anticipation. I'm expecting over 50MP which means that it will at least match the 20MP I get from my D500. But the huge plus with mirrorless cameras is that when you switch into DX mode the electronic viewfinder zooms in so that it still fills the eyepiece - the one major stumbling block I had with the D800 and other full frame cameras in cropped sensor mode.

My 2 cents.
 
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Danno

Senior Member
That said, I am waiting for the next full frame mirrorless with great anticipation. I'm expecting over 50MP which means that it will at least match the 20MP I get from my D500. But the huge plus with mirrorless cameras is that when you switch into DX mode the electronic viewfinder zooms in so that it still fills the eyepiece - the one major stumbling block I had with the D800 and other full frame cameras in cropped sensor mode.

My 2 cents.

Thank you Jake. I had never flipped my Z6 over to DX,(even when using my 200-500 f5.6). I had to try it after you mentioned it and I was quite surprised at the impact it had... Just turned around and did a quick test with my napping dog and sure enough flipping to DX with the 50mm 1.8 S lens and the crop clearly changed the view in the EVF. Thanks for mentioning that.
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
Thank you Jake. I had never flipped my Z6 over to DX,(even when using my 200-500 f5.6). I had to try it after you mentioned it and I was quite surprised at the impact it had... Just turned around and did a quick test with my napping dog and sure enough flipping to DX with the 50mm 1.8 S lens and the crop clearly changed the view in the EVF. Thanks for mentioning that.

It was a question I asked about them a couple months back and I wound up finding the answer for myself. It's the thing that will get me to switch over to the Z8/9 whenever it comes out provided that the MP's are enough for me to get over 20MP's in cropped mode.
 

snj979s

Senior Member
I had to send in my d800 to Nikon about a month ago (very pleased w Nikon service btw). During this time I got to use my friends d7000. I loved the improved frame rate ONLY. The dynamic range was yuck. The back-button focus was yuck, had to stick my thumb into my eye in order to use it. I've read the d7200 is much improved in both of these areas tho. So if I get a crop it'd be the d7200.
 

snj979s

Senior Member
I use to shoot a crop, though Sony. The noise at higher ISO and slowish lenses I had really made the switch to the d800 pleasant. lol
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
I had to send in my d800 to Nikon about a month ago (very pleased w Nikon service btw). During this time I got to use my friends d7000. I loved the improved frame rate ONLY. The dynamic range was yuck. The back-button focus was yuck, had to stick my thumb into my eye in order to use it. I've read the d7200 is much improved in both of these areas tho. So if I get a crop it'd be the d7200.

You're comparing what was the top of the line pro-sumer Full Frame camera at the time with the top consumer DX camera, so yeah, I'd expect to see some difference there. In the 8+ years I've been shooting sensor quality has jumped leaps and bounds so what you're getting now is nothing like the D7000 in terms of sensor performance. It's a lot like editing on a Mac from 4 generations ago with that version of Photoshop - you can do it but you're gonna be frustrated trying to do some of the stuff they've since put in on a slider.
 
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