Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsPhenomenal Camera
Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2019
This camera is possibly my favorite thing I've ever purchased. It's an absolute beast. My wife and I are both photographers of different types. She does portrait photography (newborn, family, etc) and I do landscape/astrophotography. For years we've been on the very-mid-range D5200. We bought it while we were still both working part time in school, so we had to go for the best one we could on the extremely limited budget we had. While it has served us well, it's obviously a cropped sensor body and it was time to upgrade to full frame, and many years later we're in a far better place financially. (READ: No more school tuition and full time job yay) We figured if we're going to spend the money on full frame, we might as well get the "dream camera", so to speak, and not feel like we need to upgrade again soon.
And so we come to the D850. Lots of research went into the decision to go with the D850, there is no shortage of videos and reading material about it, it's a landmark camera body for many reasons. Sure it's pricey, but this sucker is going to last us for years and years. I'll try to touch on all my personal favorite points, but there are literally so many that I'll probably forget some, but here we go.
Body:
Super well designed, comfortable, if not a tad on the heavy side. It's a beast of a camera though, so I can absolutely forgive the weight, and it's by no means uncomfortably heavy. Just a tad heavier than I would have thought. The weatherproofing is excellent. You can watch tons of review videos where you'll see them leaving the camera on a tripod in rainy weather to do a timelapse, and then they simply dry it off with a towel later. As a result of the weather proofing there is no built-in popup flash to make it far more sealed off. This doesn't bother me at all because I never use that flash, if I need flash I'll use an external one.
Autofocus:
If you know anything about the D850, you'll know that the autofocus in the body is industry leading. (the same autofocus as the D5) A huge number of autofocus points, incredible focus speed, it's absolutely incredible. I will simply leave this at what I've said so far since that's really all that needs to be said. It's awesome.
Controls:
Having come from the D5200 I feel like the controls are much more intuitive and better placed so as to be more ergonomic. They feel much higher quality than the D5200 which just helps with the overall premium nature of this camera. As a person who loves to do astrophotography, one of my favorite tiny improvements is the illuminated buttons! I don't know how I survived without that before this. It's one of those quality of life improvements that just makes so much sense when you finally have it.
Memory Card Slots:
So as I'm sure you're aware by now, this camera has two slots. One SD slot and one XQD slot. I originally thought I wouldn't get an XQD card, they're so much more expensive than their SD card equivalents, and I hadn't done much research into them, so I thought they were basically a chunkier SD card. I have since done the research and bought a 240 GB capacity card. The read/write speed is seriously blazing fast. Basically it can keep up with the D850, whereas an SD card by itself will start slowing you down during continuous shooting because it can't clear the buffer fast enough. Transfer speeds to my computer are so much faster than my SD card. (note that you do need to buy a card reader for it) It's also incredibly durable which is a great thing to not worry about when you're in more rugged environments. My only complaint about the D850 now that I've bought into the XQD vision is that they only have one XQD slot and one SD card slot. I understand that XQD isn't widely adopted right now, and that increases the barrier to entry for this camera, but I do wish that there were two XQD card slots in this camera rather than one of each. I have a large enough card, however, that I haven't had a big enough session that I started writing to the SD card yet, so that's not that big of a deal. (I usually remove everything off the card when I import right after my session, so I always start at empty)
Touchscreen/Live View:
I was skeptical that I would ever use the touchscreen aspect of the screen but I must say I was wrong. I use it very often. The screen itself is large, bright, and great resolution. You can pinch to zoom on your pictures and zoom in to see some incredible detail this camera takes. (something I couldn't really do before until I was on my computer) It tilts up and down, a really handy feature that I forget about too often. (as I stand on my tiptoes to see when the camera is up high, I suddenly realize I don't need to do that, the screen tilts) Live View is also incredible on this camera, again I use it far more than I thought I would. You can even autofocus on specific areas/objects by simply tapping the screen. It's incredibly useful, and the screen is high enough quality that it really does your pictures justice. Very impressed with it.
Timelapse:
You can create a 4k timelapse video right in-camera. You can even create an 8k timelapse using the interval mode and the full resolution photos able to be taken by the D850, although this is not stitched together in-camera, so you'll need to do that yourself. There are some incredible timelapses out there produced by the D850 that you can watch, the image quality is exceptional. You can also use Silent Live View mode, and that'll not use any mechanical shutter. As stated in the camera's product description, this is great for saving on shutter cycles and improving battery performance.
Video:
In addition to the photography I enjoy, I love shooting video. As everyone knows, Nikon doesn't do as well as Canon in this regard. Of all Nikon's cameras, the D850 appears to be the best when it comes to shooting video. The autofocus while shooting video is not good, so you'd better settle on using manual focus. None of this means that the D850 will produce bad video. If you know how to work around some of the annoyances and less-than-stellar features, you'll get video that is just fine. Most of us, however, aren't getting the D850 for shooting video, so let's talk about the true purpose of this camera.
Image Quality:
Thus we arrive to the most important aspect of any camera review, the image quality. This is actually a section where I have very little to say, partly because I covered a lot of supporting info, and the other part because it's quite simple. This camera is a beast. It's got a whopping 45.7 megapixels. This was a major upgrade for me, coming from the 24.1 megapixels in my D5200. I'm incredibly impressed with the sheer amount of data collected in the RAW images especially coming from my D5200. The amount of detail I can bring out in post is impressive. As such, the RAW files are very large, so hopefully you have plenty of storage space. It has great low-light capabilities, and the autofocus works surprisingly well even in low light. I can't think of a single complaint about this category, which speaks to the incredible images this camera produces.
If you can afford it, I can't recommend this camera enough. It's an incredible piece of technology, one of the best cameras you can buy. If you are looking for an incredible full frame DSLR with no compromises (minus video of course) then look no further than the Nikon D850.
