Side Note: Would you recommend the 1.7 II over the 2.0 III with the 70-200 VR2? I find mixed reviews and not many yet with the d800.
I've got a 2X III coming tomorrow. I'm going to try it out on the 70-200 and see. I had pretty good results with a Canon 2X TC on the 1D4/70-200 V2 so I'm interested to see if the Nikon equiv. is as good or better.
The D800 / 70-200 VRII with 1.7X feels snappier AF wise then the 70-200/2X/mkIV but that's probably to be expected. We'll see if the 2X offers any improvement in AF.
One can crop an awful lot with a 36mp FF and still get "a lot of pixels on the duck" so to speak so the Nikon 70-200 with 1.7 may be a nice compromise with regards to reach, IQ and AF speed. It's no 400 f5.6L weight wise but I had no problem picking up the birds today with the 70/200 / 1.7.
bbvaj wrote:
I did a detailed evaluation on the number of frames I can capture with D800 before the buffer fills. I was using Transcend 400X 32GB CF for NEF's and Transcend class 10 16GB for JPEGS.
I've been very happy with the Transcend 400x CF cards, and with Transcend generally for the last 6 years I've used their cards, but I've found the Class 10 SD's to be a little slow. You might try some of the newer UHS-1 SD cards... the Sandisk cards I'm using right now are rated for 95 MBps write, 90 MBps read and 64GB cards were around $200.
rd4tile wrote:
I've got a 2X III coming tomorrow. I'm going to try it out on the 70-200 and see. I had pretty good results with a Canon 2X TC on the 1D4/70-200 V2 so I'm interested to see if the Nikon equiv. is as good or better.
The D800 / 70-200 VRII with 1.7X feels snappier AF wise then the 70-200/2X/mkIV but that's probably to be expected. We'll see if the 2X offers any improvement in AF.
One can crop an awful lot with a 36mp FF and still get "a lot of pixels on the duck" so to speak so the Nikon 70-200 with 1.7 may be a nice compromise with regards to reach, IQ and AF speed. It's no 400 f5.6L weight wise but I had no problem picking up the birds today with the 70/200 / 1.7.
I'm happy with my D800+500VR+TC14EII but am disappointed with the TC17EII on that combo -- that otherwise was quite good with my D300. I've never liked the TC20EIII, especially on an f4 lens.
But I do wish the FPS was higher. I'm hoping the D400 might be better in that regard, provided Nikon doesn't hamstring the ISO and AF performance.
The D800 is excellent for AFing BIF. I find it quicker to acquire AF and also more accurate than my D700.
I don't bother using DX mode as this just restricts the area in which to compose the image, much better to crop to DX, or more importantly, to whatever size you want in Post Process. The beauty of this is that you can then position the bird in the photo how you want in PP wheras if you had taken the shot in DX, you may have inadvertently put the bird too close to the edge of the frame and had it looking like it had no where to fly into.
D800 + 300 f2.8 VRII
These next 3 shots were taken on a rocking boat in 2mt (6ft) swell!!
Cropped about 25%
Cropped about 25%
Cropped about 30%
Cropped about 50%!
Even with the 300 + 1.4x TCII it works great! This has been cropped about 30%.
This was before I sent it in to Nikon to have the AF fixed (left AF was way off, and overall it seemed to miss a lot randomly, it's excellent now)...still, worked pretty well. Sigma 120-300mm OS with the Sigma 2x on it. Extremely heavy crop:
exactly 
