The XQD cards have been introduced with the D4 so it's not really that new.
Right, but practically no one is using them. Canon is using CFast cards not XQD, and Sandisk is not making XQD cards. The low market share means the cards are several times more expensive than they should be.
And even then, Nikon offered two different slots, the other being for CF cards.
Which meant to use the quintessential in camera backup feature, you were stuck with the performance of the CF card and had to have identically sized CF and XQD cards in pairs, an additional cost. In my opinion having mismatched cards is a bad idea that complicates things.
I am all in for standardization and it seems that CF cards are becoming the past and that XQD are the future.
No it is not. Canon is the largest player in the professional photography market and they are not using XQD but a different high performance card standard (CFast) in their video cameras. If Canon commits to a format it basically means that few will believe the competing format will survive in the long term and users may start investing against it, essentially placing a bet on the biggest dog. This is my main concern with regards to XQD. Canon haven't put CFast cards yet in a still camera so there is a faint hope. After a few years whatever Canon chooses will likely become the standard. Of course if Sony and Nikon are nice to their customers, they'll try to continue supporting XQD but if the alternate high performance card format gets majority then prices will be lower for that format and XQD will remain expensive. Anyway, maybe things will go well for XQD but in the past there have been several cases where only one of two very similar media types have survived.
Interstingly though, Sony's blu ray did prevail so that gives XQD hope.
I see a D5 as a no compromise camera, only the best features and best specs, hence XQD cards.
They could have read the tea leaves and chosen the same card type as the market leader.
My initial point was, if you can afford a D5, you should be able to afford new memory cards.
The cost is not the main issue but if something is manufactured, its production has energy and natural resource costs, waste etc. and so in order to conserve the planet, any product should be used as long as its useful life allows, ie. until it fails, unless it is like the W12 car that you mention, and produces so much pollution that it should be demolished as quickly as possible to save the planet.
The fact that Sony is not using XQD in their A7 line suggests that they believe it may be a liability and don't want to use it to avoid customers being spooked off. In my opinion only if both Sony and Nikon use XQD across both their lineups of high performance cameras does the format have a chance against Canon and Sandisk. This is what I hope will happen.
If you want to drive a W12 engine car you should be able to afford the fuel costs.
If you buy that W12 and it can only use a new type of fuel which can be purchased only in three stations worldwide would you believe it will continue to be available in the future?
If you don't need the speed of the D5, do you really need a D5 then?
Speed and buffer are two different things. Needing a 200 image buffer suggests it is likely that the user isn't very good at action photography and are shooting anything and everything instead of focusing on likely situations for good pictures.
And yes, the D5 has other things of value than its speed.
When I use the cornermost AF point in the Multi-CAM 3500 array in an FX camera, the camera quite often fails to focus on the subject. Yet this is in a position in the frame which is ideal for an off centered, dynamic composition and I often need to use such points. The D5 has a larger focus point array with more cross type points and it's more likely to work reliably in such usage.
Also with the second tier FX cameras I frequently have problems in winter photography, this includes the D700, D800 and now my D810. All of them tend to fail when it's sufficiently cold and humid. In the winter I photograph the sea freezing. The D700 would simply go black when I would press MENU it would go all dark in these conditions. The D3 and D3X never showed this kind of misbehavior in similar conditions. Also the D800 and D810 show comparable but different signs of malfunction in the same conditions. The D800 would simply hang. The D810 just last week would display "Err" on three consequtive days when I was photographing the freezing sea at -25 to -19 degrees Celsius. Admittedly the relative humidity must have been close to 100%, but still what happened is that after the error message, M-UP failed to work, and the camera appeared to be in single shot mode. Some of the images captured were not stored on the card, and some had gross over or underexposure. Live view showed an image which got dimmer as I opened up (!) the aperture. Now, while I admit the conditions were rough the fact is that I've used D3 and D3X in similar conditions numerous times without a single faulty behavior showing up. This suggests to me that they are built to different standards of weather, cold and humidity resistance. Now, if I remove the high humidity factor, the D810 can handle the cold better. Still the otherworldly landscape that exists as water freezes in these temperatures is what I want to photograph and I need a tool that will work perfectly reliably in these conditions. The right conditions are not repeated often; after the sea has frozen the next opportunity is usually the next year, and sometimes the right weather conditions do not repeat for a few years, so from my point of view the camera has to work. Interestingly enough a friend of mine who shoots with Canons doesn't have this kind of problems in the same conditions, and he exposes his gear for a much longer time to this environment than I do since he shoots winter landscape professionally.
The single digit Nikon also have a shape which is more easy to use with winter gloves and because of the lack of the pop up flash the 24 PC-E is much easier to use. When shifting the lens along the long axis, on a D810 the shift lock has to be under the viewfinder / popup housing where it is difficult to reach. I had to take my gloves off to lock it, which resulted in frostbite - I have painful red areas all over the backs of my right hand because of this. The D3X (and presumably D5) allow the shift knob to be in front of the viewfinder housing and the lock to be on the easily accessible other side where I can use it even with some thin gloves on. Thus the handling of this lens is easier with single digit Nikons (and the Df). This is because there is no popup flash housing that would block access to the lens controls.
These applications have nothing to do with the speed of the D5 and I would likely not use the burst feature more than twice a year, but that doesn't mean I will not benefit from the camera. Now, there may be a D820 in the wings, with "almost" D5 AF, and it'll probably be pop up free thankfully, as the D500 now is. But since the three predecessors in this series have all failed to withstand the kind of environment I put them into in my winter photography, and function reliably, I doubt the next model will, either. Yes, I could bring a whole slew of cameras and hope some will work but I'd rather have one that always works.
The larger battery of the big cameras also benefits winter usage although admittedly the D810's battery consumption is very low in the cold (with LV usage) as it is, a big improvement from its predecessors. However, I need a camera that won't say "Err" when it is feeling a bit of cold. If I can withstand the environment, so should the camera.
I rarely use the burst feature of my cameras, however, so I don't need a 200 image buffer instead of an already large (say) 50 image buffer. In my view the peak action should be recognized by the photographer and timed based on the knowledge of the subject and what they see through the viewfinder. Very rarely do I run into a situation where I get better results letting the camera do a burst. And when I did use the 9fps burst feature of my D3, I ended up with a ton of out of focus, badly timed shots because it's so indiscriminant and the camera wouldn't be able to maintain focus on the approaching subject wide open anyway, at that frame rate. (People who shoot action stopped down to f/5.6 or f/8 may have better luck, and newer cameras probably AF faster and the mirror up dead time is likely shorter.) I consider the timing of the shots a part of my personality and photographic style, and it's not something I can give to a machine, except in very unusual scenarios where something that I see in the viewfinder would distract me and cause systematically failed prediction and timing of shots. In such a scenario I can use CH to nail the shot but it's really rare.
