I have been waiting for this Nikon announcement for nearly two years now. And today they (finally) officially announced the D800 and also the D800E. I’m not going to go into too many technical details about these cameras as all the information can be found here.
The surprise for me was the D800E, which I hadn’t really heard any rumours about until yesterday. Now I’m struggling to decide which one to pre-order… The biggest issue is that I need my camera to perform well under low light conditions (= higher ISO) without producing noisy pictures. Film grain is something different entirely and can actually add to the feel of a photo, but noise… Ugh. Considering the staggering amount of mp’s in this camera (36.3 to be exact!), I’m a little worried that this will compromise image quality when shooting in low light. I suppose I’m a bit hung up on this as I was previously planning on getting the D700, which received lots of praise for its low light performance. However, the D700’s mp count is only a third of the D800, which means that you won’t be able to enlarge or crop your photos as much.
The D800E has had the anti-aliasing/low-pass filter removed which means that you’ll be able to take full advantage of the sensor capability, although it may introduce moiré when there are repetitive patterns in your subject (see one example here). I’m not sure yet if I think the extra sharpness (at the cost of various artifacts appearing in your photos) is worth the additional cash. The Nikon D800 can be pre-ordered in the UK for £2400 and the D800E for £2690 (compared to $3000 for the D800 in the US which is approximately £1900… Why the ridiculous £500 price difference?). I will most likely be pre-ordering my D800 from Jessops very soon anyway. And then I’ll just need to wait until March when it will actually start shipping (fingers crossed that it won’t be delayed as the D4 has been)… Considering how patient I’ve been for nearly two years, another month shouldn’t make a massive difference. So excited!
On another note, I came across a project I did quite a while ago, a barbaric photo story about what goes on in the kitchen when no-one is watching…
