Nikon D850 Camera

I have long been a devotee of mirrorless cameras and I have sort of gone on the record saying that unless you do sports where high end DSLR autofocus is important, there is little reason to get a DSLR.

I still hold that view, by and large, but now that my daughter does gymnastics, my autofocus requirements are becoming ever more significant.  In principle, I was still planning to stick with mirrorless and get Olympus E-M1 Mark II.  With fast prime lenses it would likely work all right for me.

Then Nikon went ahead and announced the D850 and priced it lower than I expected (pre-order link here).  This has got me sufficiently interested that I am actually considering  getting one instead of the Olympus.

There are two reasons for that.  One is the autofocus system inherited from D5.  I have tried and it is the best in the business at the moment.  Another is the combination of crazy dynamic region and very high resolution.  I am not really that particular about ultra high resolution, but what I like doing is using prime lenses and cropping as necessary.

That 45 megapixel FX  sensor in the D850 gives me exactly that.  For example, if I use Nikon’s excellent and light weight 35mm F/1.8 lens and crop it to DX format, it ends up being a 50mm equivalent 20 megapixel image.  If I crop it to micro-4/3 format, it ends up being a 70mm equivalent 10 megapixel image.  For the record, for years I was using Olympus E510 DSLR and its 10 megapixel image had plenty of resolution.

More recently, I spent a lot of time with Leica Q and its 28mm prime lens.  I did the same type of cropping with it out to about 50mm equivalent and liked the images.

So, D850 got my interest peaked.  While the camera is fairly large, with the resolution it has, I can get a lot of mileage out of two compact and light prime lenses: 35mm F/1.8 and 50mm F/1.8.  The resulting travel kit is more or less the same size and weight as my planned Micro-4/3 travel kit: E-M1 Mark II with 12-100mm F/4 and 25mm F/1.2.

The D850 kit would have an advantage in basic image quality and low light, while the Micro-4/3 kit would still be a bit more flexible in terms of FOVs.

Price-wise, it works out about the same.

Had my daughter not started doing indoor sports fairly seriously, I would stick with mirrorless.

Now, I have some decisions to make.