I've had the opportunity to play around with a D810 pre production model today and would like to share some thoughts with you.
First thing you'll notice is the better feel in your hands as the grip is much more ergonomic than on the D800(E). Very nice, Nikon!
Next is the shutter sound. Wow! Big improvement over the D800(E). The shutter is really much more quiet and the camera shakes less when you switch into live view. Sounds really great!
My main focus was the live view performance and how it compares to the crappy live view of the D800(E).
First impression was good. The live view is now tack sharp on the completely new display. Killer! No more interlacing in 100% view. Big improvement if you use manual focus lenses.
However.... live view performance in low light is not improved at all. My impression is that you see even more color noise in dark parts of the image when you use live view in low light conditions.
Here Canon is still king (unfortunately)
What I noticed additionally is a different display of the virtual horizon.
The histogram that you get with the button of the curser while reviewing your shot is now white instead of yellow.
Split screen is a really cool feature for landscape photographers. Unfortunately you can only select two points on a horizontal line to be displayed magnified side by side on the display. If you shoot in portrait orientation this helps a lot as you can can focus on the foreground and background at the same time. Killer feature for work with tilt-shift lenses. But when you shoot in horizontal you can only select points to compare on a horizontal line which makes it useless for optimization of sharpness from front to back. Don't know what Nikon thought about wen the developed this feature...
Beside the improved AF there are many small changes and/or improvements. Let's see what the sensor delivers in terms of ISO performance.
Hardcore wrote:
Did you try the live view with exposure simulation mode turned on and off? Maybe the huge noise was with the lens stopped down.
Thanks for posting!
Exposure simulation was turned on and the lens was stopped down because I wanted to test how the performance looks in low light. That is when the noise appears and that has been the main drawback of the D800(E). The D810 shows even more noise though the image itself is now tack sharp (which is however a big improvement)
Steve Perry wrote:
At least the live view is sharper - they got it half way there. I'd love to be able to actually use it in low light, but the struggle continues.
Thanks for posting this
Hey Steve,
But in low light, really the important thing to be able to check is focus. So if it's sharp as the OP says, we don't really care if the image has color noise in the zoomed in display, all we are looking for is sharpness... So in terms of usability I think Nikon scored big then with the Liveview improvements.
But in low light, really the important thing to be able to check is focus. So if it's sharp as the OP says, we don't really care if the image has color noise in the zoomed in display, all we are looking for is sharpness... So in terms of usability I think Nikon scored big then with the Liveview improvements.
Jim
Good point, and it will definitely be better. However, I know when I'm doing low light shots in the woods, sometimes my live view is so dark it's nearly just a black screen. I have to stop down to 2.8 just to be able to see focus, and some lenses (14-24 for instance) suffer from a bit of focus shift when stopping back down.
Besides, it would be cool to use live view for astrophotography
My issue with D800 LV has been if I am shooting outdoors and I am focusing on a backlit subject, the subject has no contrast and is very dark whereas the Canon LV is able to bump up the brightness and contrast. Can you comment on the D810 with regard to this?
Nice improvement. Did you happen to test the electronic first curtain shutter? It would be awfully nice if a $3k+ Nikon could shoot as quickly and quietly in live view as a $500 Sony (and yes, I know they're radically different systems... but it would still be nice).
Thanks for posting this, as a landscape shooter using PC/E lenses the improved Live View on the D810 is just what I was hoping for, this coupled with the lower base ISO and the shutter improvements now makes this, at least for myself, a very tempting upgrade from the D800e.
