Category Archives: Nikon bodies

About Nikon DSLRs

The Nikon D800

Hardware, Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses

No more Cold Turkey.

‘Cold Turkey’ refers to the process whereby and addict gives up addictive substances in one fell swoop. No weaning, no cutting back, no phasing out. Bang. All at once. The most compelling version of the process can be seen in French Connection II where poor old Gene Hackman is made an addict of heroin by his captors. It’s a disturbing movie and a good one.

And when the iPhone 11 Pro came along I went Cold Turkey with regard to my DSLR, MFT and 35mm film hardware. The Nikon D3x, the D700, the two film bodies – FE2 and F100 – and two Panny GX7 bodies along with a plethora of lenses were all sold, right down to the last lens cap and card reader. In the four years since I have been chugging along (almost) happily with that iPhone and its successor, the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Almost? Well, in a word the ergonomics are indistinguishable from the function of a bilge pump. Both suck. And the reach at the long end is extremely limited.

So the other day finding that I might want a ‘serious’ camera on occasion I reneged on the ‘iPhone only’ commitment and bought a DSLR and lens.


The Nikon D800, introduced in 2012. Mine came with two Nikon batteries
and the ghastly factory strap, quickly replaced with an Upstrap which I found in a drawer.

My D800 body came with a mint 85/1.8 AF-D Nikkor which I immediately resold. Never sell a body with a lens – you will lose money on both, as did my seller.

What is the thinking behind buying a camera discontinued almost a decade ago, along with a 28-300mm VR Nikkor discontinued in 2021? There is a host of good reasons.

Quality: As an upper end Nikon body, the D800 succeeded the fine D700, upping the sensor megapixel count from 12 to 36. Who needs 36 megapixels? See below. The body is robust and the shutter long lived with subsequent iterations (D810, D850) adding little.

Economics: At introduction the D800 retailed for $3,000. The latest Nikon mirrorless digital bodies sell for $2,000 to $5,500 (Z6/II, Z9) and you need the latest Z series lenses to take full advantage of what these offer. By contrast the used D800 I just acquired ran me $525 with a very low shutter count of under 16,000.


Open a snap in Preview for a shutter actuation count.

You can buy beaters with hundreds of thousands of actuations (probably ex realtors, wedding snappers and war types) for just a little less, which seems pretty dumb to me (KEH on the web, Roberts Camera and many others on eBay), especially given the abundant availability of lightly used bodies. I got a mint body and, for another $450, a mint 28-300mm ‘lens for all seasons’ VR Nikon AF-S lens. And I had to splash out another $13 on an SD/CF card reader (the D800 can use one of each) as mine had been sold at the start of the Cold Turkey interlude.

Negligible depreciation: With the D800 having lost over 80% (!) of its original cost in the decade since it was discontinued it’s not going to go much lower very fast. So if I get disillusioned with my purchase it’s out of here for negligible net cost. Same reason I only buy used cars …. every 20 years!

The Nikon F mount: It’s probably fair to say that more lenses were made with the Nikon F mount than with any other. The new mirrorless Z cameras dictate the use of a kludgy adapter with these and you do not get the full functionality of the latest Z optics. But with the Nikon F mount you do get access to some of the finest SLR optics made at ridiculously low cost. My own journey through that cornucopia of choice is best seen here. And all those manual focus Nikkors work with the confirmation light in the viewfinder of the D800, taking the guesswork out of critical focus.The D800 will happily use old screw drive AF-D lenses as well as the latest AF-S optics, not to mention the old and vast range of manual focus lenses.

Weight: The D700 weighed 40ozs, the D3x 50ozs, with the Z6/II and Z9 coming in at 25 and 47ozs (!), respectively. The D800 weighs 35ozs, just 10ozs more than the Z6/II. Not bad.

Cropping: While sensors of 45 megapixels are now common on the high end, the 36 megapixels introduced with the D800 was a revelation. If your lenses are of decent quality then you can extend the long end with cropping rather than carrying extra glass. Here’s a case in point:


D800, 28-300VR at 300mm. ISO 800.


Crop of the above image.

The cropped image is one quarter of the full frame, meaning the focal length equivalent is no less than 1200mm. Handheld. VR is the icing on the cake of the D800’s big sensor. The crop is unprocessed – the minor color fringing and sharpness drop off are easily fixed in Lightroom.

Lightroom: I refuse to ‘upgrade’ to Adobe’s subscription version of Lightroom. I prefer to keep control over my images. My purchased version (6.4) has not been materially improved and natively supports import of D800 RAW files with no special tricks required. All I have to do is plug in my $13 USB3 card reader into the 2010 Mac Pro (still barely improved on by Apple, and adequately powerful to deal with the D800’s large files), with USB3 being a nice way of speedily handling those 70 megapixel uncompressed RAW files. Nice.

In conclusion, if you want a state-of-the-art camera and lens combination, have no issues with buying used, do not wish to spend over $1,000 and lose very little should things not pan out, the D800 with a modern polycarbonate-encased Nikkor AF-S lens is the way to go. And the ergonomics are the best on the market – button placement, feel in the hands, use with gloves, the menu system, and so on.

Hit with the ugly stick

Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses

Hard to imagine something that looks worse.

I am a long time fan of Nikon’s hardware. Click here and you can access an index of the dozens of Nikon related articles on this blog.

And, for the most part, while it’s performance that matters, it never hurts if the hardware is pleasant to contemplate and Nikon’s aesthetics have been generally decent, if not stellar. Sure, there’s none of the elegance of Pentax or the beauty of early Leica M bodies, but Nikons like the legendary Nikon F brought with their designs a macho sensibility to complement their wonderful utility.

So I look at their latest mirrorless body, and I weep:



The Nikon camel – a horse designed by a committee.

And the ‘designers’ – if there were any – attached a quite stupendously ugly lens to this cobbled together excrescence of a body. Yeah, I know how to make good pictures, but with something this grotesque in my hands, the task becomes impossibly challenging.

Desperation at Nikon

Nikon bodies

Shameless revenue grab.

Time to hire the investment bankers at Nikon and sell the parts while they have some value left:


Gimme the money. Click the image for the story.

There is no comparison with like action by Apple. An iPhone with its intricate weather sealing and complex internals is not something for the local butcher to fix and, last I checked, Apple was not going out of business. Also, unlike Nikon, their 80 million iPhones sold annually do not arrive faulty or with serious design flaws. Quick, how many iPhone recalls do you remember?

Nikon is failing owing to Apple’s superb iPhone cameras, made by Sony, with Cupertino brains. That’s why they are making this pathetic revenue grab. Amusingly, the picture in the linked article testifies to Nikon’s incompetence – the stripped camera is being handled with bare, greasy fingers.

It has long been Nikon’s policy to refuse repair at the factory places for ‘grey’ market imports – the sort of thing companies like B&H was offloading in boatloads when they were not allegedly cheating on sales taxes. Now you will not be able to get your Nikon fixed anywhere but at Nikon. So when your $5,000 D6 ‘professional’ behemoth fails, get in line or do as Jaguar owners of yore did. Buy two. One for use, the other in the repair shop.

Camera prices unchanged in 50 years

Nikon bodies

More capability, same price.

I happen to still have my copies of the Wallace Heaton ‘Blue Book’ gear catalogs from the 1960s. These were published annually by the bespoke supplier of gear to HM QE2, the firm going bankrupt a few years later when they failed to see discounted high street retail coming. They remain an interesting historical artifact, or artefact if you speak the Queen’s English.

Here is the listing for the best 35mm film SLR of the time – I would argue it was the best film SLR of all time – the Nikon F. This is from the 1969 Blue Book, 50 years ago:


Nikon F in 1969

With the clunky Photomic FTN metering head the Nikon F retailed for £270.73 (converted to decimal from pounds, shilling and pence – long live the Empire).

Going to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics web site for the history of the Consumer Price Index and to the Bank of England site for the exchange rate of the pound sterling against the US dollar (yes, it’s been downhill those 50 years) the multiplier for the 1969 price converted to 2019 US dollars comes to 15.4. So that £270.73 of 1969 is $4,170 today.

Looking at the current price for the top of the line Nikon DSLR today, the D5, discloses a retail price of $6,500 for the body and $200 for the 50mm f/1.8G standard lens, a total of $6,700. For the like-equipped D850 the total comes to $3,200 and the Z7 comes to $3,150.

Now capabilities of the 1969 and 2019 gear are not easily compared other than to say that the modern digital body and lens are superior in every way – speed, reliability, ISO range, storage capacity and so on. The 1969 Nikon F falls in the middle of the price range of the (arguably overpriced) D5 and the extremely capable D850. Indeed, common sense probably dictates the choice of two D850s over one D5 at the same price. The overall price change, inflation adjusted, has not changed at all. But the capabilities of the modern hardware are two orders of magnitude removed from that of the 50 year old predecessor.

Nikon – a magnificent legacy

Cameras, Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses

The Nikon Museum in Tokyo.


Click the image to go to the interactive Google view.

Nikon honors its legacy in the extensive displays in the Nikon Museum. When Nikon abandoned the Zeiss Contax lens mount replacing it with the F mount in its first – and best – SLR, the peerless Nikon F, it was as much a statement of intent as it was an act of courage. The wisdom of that decision persists to this day when even the earliest F mount lenses can be mounted on the latest Nikon D850 DSLR.

Now with a new, wider mount in the Z6/Z7 mirrorless offerings, Nikon has finally begun to abandon the flapping mirror in favor of what is already acknowledged as the best EVF in the business, the one found in the new Z bodies.


A display of rangefinder bodies which preceded the Nikon F. The related lenses put Nikon on the map.

Leitz, Wetzlar used to be the owner of the legacy crown, snatched from it by Nikon with the Nikon F which saw the rangefinder Leica M bodies migrate from being workhorses to becoming silly Veblen goods. The working pro gives these not even a passing thought, no more than an enthusiastic driver thinks about Rolls Royces.


The Nikon F. The camera which changed everything. This camera did to the German
camera industry what Honda did to British motorcycles.