Nikon D850
Get the full low-down on Nikon’s newest DSLR with our massive eight-page review!
Maybe you can have your cake and eat it after all! The new Nikon D850 delivers both high resolution and speed, as Rod Lawton discovers
For a long time, professional photographers have faced
a hard choice. You can get a camera with great resolution, such as the D810, but no real speed; or you can get a high-speed specialist like the D5, but you then have to compromise on resolution. You could even end up buying one of each.
This is why the new Nikon D850 is such a big deal. It doesn’t just raise the bar for resolution, it delivers a continuous shooting speed to rival a dedicated sports camera. At last, this is a professional DSLR that really can do anything. What’s more, this blend of speed and resolution is just one facet of a camera that could be Nikon’s most important new model for years.
Nikon has a number of photography genres in mind with the D850, including nature and landscapes, weddings, fashion and sport. In fact, this camera’s abilities are so wideranging that it could probably tackle anything more than competently.
So let’s take look at those specifications. Firstly, there’s the new sensor, which has an effective resolution of 45.7Mp – 25 per cent more than the ground-breaking Nikon D810. The D850’s sensor has been designed with no anti-aliasing (low-pass) filter so that it can capture the maximum possible detail. This is going to place heavy demands on both your lenses and your technique, as we’ll see later.
Then there’s the maximum continuous shooting speed of 9fps at full resolution, and with a buffer capacity of 51 uncompressed 14-bit Raw files. That is quite amazing, although there are a couple of caveats. The first is that you need the optional MB-D18 Multi-Power Battery Pack and EN-EL18b battery (as used in the Nikon D5) to achieve this speed. Without the grip, the camera can only shoot at 7fps – though that’s still impressive for a camera with this level of resolution.
The quoted buffer capacity is also a ‘best-case’ figure. The D850 comes with two very fast card slots – one for XQD cards, one for UHS-II SD cards – and you’ll need fast cards to go with them if you want to get anywhere near the quoted buffer capacity. Our tests also show that while these buffer capacities are achievable at the regular 7fps frame rate, they drop significantly using the grip at 9fps.
While the D850 does achieve an extraordinary blend of resolution and speed, it can’t quite carry this through
into a high ISO range. The new sensor has a back-illuminated design and gapless on-chip microlenses, but inevitably the photosites are smaller than the D5’s and thus the ISO range is lower.
It’s still pretty good, going from ISO64-25,600 in standard mode and offering ISO32-102,400 in expanded mode – and Nikon has used its powerful EXPEED 5 processor to help with noise control – but you wouldn’t choose this over a camera like the D5 for extreme low-light photography.
While its ISO range is fairly unremarkable by today’s standards, the D850’s 153-point autofocus system works down to -3EV across all its focus points (as does the 180K-pixel RGB sensor and Advanced Scene Recognition system), and the centre AF point works down to -4EV.
The Multi-CAM 20K AF sensor is powerful but its coverage does not extend to the edges of the frame – though you can always switch to Live View, and although this still uses relatively slow contrast autofocus, the new tilting touchscreen display is now much more useful. You can set it up for touch-focus and even touchshutter operation, and a new Pinpoint AF mode helps you identify tiny targets, which is important given this camera’s level of resolution.
The Live View mode has another trick – a silent photography mode where the D850 switches to its electronic shutter and can shoot without making any noise at all. What’s more, because there’s no mirror or shutter movement, there’s less risk of mechanically induced blur. You can shoot at up to 6fps at full resolution in this mode – or at an amazing 30fps at a reduced resolution of 8Mp.
This is perfect for sports, where cameras are usually banned at key moments, and for theatrical performances and weddings, where a clattering shutter would just spoil the moment.
We also need to talk about video. The D850 shoots 4K UHD video, as we all expected it would, but it uses the full sensor area to do so – it’s full-frame 4K. This means your lens focal lengths stay the same and you no longer have to juggle with irritating crop factors.
This camera’s abilities are so wide-ranging that it could probably tackle anything