I got my D800 today, and I feel a bit like Roy Scheider in Jaws after he saw the size of the shark. The files that come out of this camera are huge and remarkably good. The 36 megapixels are also pushing the envelope of all of the rest of my equipment.
Lenses
The camera is so sharp that it is showing focus falloff where my D700 did not. Even great modern lenses like the 14-24 are showing signs of image imperfections that I have never seen before. I suppose I’ll need to test all of my lenses and see which ones are up to using on this camera. I also expect that I’ll need to test them at all apertures.
There’s a potential limits of diffraction problem with this kind of pixel density.
Lonaconing Silk Mill, Lonaconing, MD 60mm Micro Nikkor @ f/8
Click here for the Zoomify version
Cards
I’m getting 175 images on an 8 GB CF card. That’s going to go quickly. I have a bunch of much larger SD cards (32 GB), but they are slower. Again, it looks like I’ll be doing some testing here. I want first to see if any of the cards will produce a slowdown in shooting speed as they struggle to keep up with the data writing. After that, I’ll want to see what download times are for the various cards. This will certainly be important in the field.
Hard Drives
I’ll be filling these up much faster with 40-50 MB raw files (14 bit, lossless compressed). This will certainly mean new portable drives for my upcoming trip to China, as well as for any extended location shoot. And the archive drives will also be filling up faster, so there’s another purchase there as well.
Computer
These files are big, and process slowly. I have a feeling I’m going to need as much speed as I can get. New iMac? New Macbook Pro? Not sure.
Web publishing technology
There’s also a need to be able to view these images over the web. Photoshop has come with something called Zoomify – linked here – that can help with this. But there’s some new technology called Piqsure that does this with HTML5 in some pretty cool ways. More on that soon.