Arrival of Nikon mirrorless (finally!)

[Erik Lund]

OK 


The lens in the teaser looks like a fixed focal length lens, there seems to be no distinctive diameter jump between a zoom and a focus ring as you see in almost all zoom Nikkors, so classic 35mm f/1.4 or standard 50mm f/1.4,,, could even be 24mm f/1.4 the old AFS G sure is popular!


The new kit lens should be a 24-70mm f/4 - Getting excited 

[Jack Dahlgren]

OK 


The lens in the teaser looks like a fixed focal length lens, there seems to be no distinctive diameter jump between a zoom and a focus ring as you see in almost all zoom Nikkors, so classic 35mm f/1.4 or standard 50mm f/1.4,,, could even be 24mm f/1.4 the old AFS G sure is popular!


The new kit lens should be a 24-70mm f/4 - Getting excited 

The lens in the video looked like a short zoom to me. With the larger mount there is no need to neck down the lens as it reaches the body so it can be constant diameter.

As for square format, the video rather clearly shows a rectangular sensor.

The thing that puzzles me(haven’t look at it closely enough is the reason the beam of light takes a right angle turn somewhere along the way. Looks like the cluster of photons hits the sensor, the. There is phase detection (the orthogonal planes) then it is interpreted as color and pixelized and sent to the rear display. Maybe the bend symbolizes tilting rear display? I hope so.

I’m hoping to be able to get O Nikkor and Heligon focusing a bit closer to infinity with a camera like this and though my dF is fine I do sometimes wish for video and more MP while still fitting in my bag everyday.

[Akira]

By the look of the teaser the lenses are huge anyway, they will most like not be the size of Leica M lenses,,, 

The lens in the teaser looks like a fixed focal length lens, there seems to be no distinctive diameter jump between a zoom and a focus ring as you see in almost all zoom Nikkors, so classic 35mm f/1.4 or standard 50mm f/1.4,,, could even be 24mm f/1.4 the old AFS G sure is popular!

The new kit lens should be a 24-70mm f/4 - Getting excited 

The Leica M lenses "can" be smaller, because they don't need AF or VR.  The SL lenses are as large as the other DSLR or full-frame mirrorless lenses.

Also, the Leica M lenses "cannot" be any larger, because they must not interfere with the rangefinder.

I would bet that the lens shown in the teaser is the rumored f0.95 lens.   

[Ilkka Nissilä]

We don’t disagree as much as you might think, but I am still hopeful many D850 users WILL discern a need for the new camera and will want to sell their D850s to help fund the purchase. As I said, a higher megapixel count sensor in the new camera would be helpful in driving that process. 

Personally I find already the 45MP too much for me and a bit of a pain in terms of storage requirements. Everything takes more space and I am trying not to spend more money on storage.  I would like a D850-like camera with 24MP.

I think also for mirrorless, 24MP is close to optimal for general practical use. I hope they make such a camera at least as one of the new models.  I agree a high pixel count does help to sell new cameras but I don't really believe it is genuinely in the best interests of the majority of photographers to buy such a camera. In the D850's case I bought it because of the new flash system and the new AF, and despite of the high pixel count which to me is a negative but not enough to keep me from the camera.

I actually sold the D750 after a brief period of use because I felt it is too small to use comfortably with my hands. Also the skin colors differed from the other models that I have and I didn't want that difference, either. It made more difficult to produce unified look across images shot with different cameras.

[MFloyd]

I am hopeful, although not optimistic, this will bring some D850s into the used market. It would be helpful if the new camera had a higher megapixel count than the D850.

There are still some people who believe that mirrorless will replace DSLR (live side by side: OK).

The D850 is a very large and bulky camera, heavy and inconvenient to tote around. The mirrorless will be smaller, lighter and much easier to carry. Only a true fossil would want a D850 after the mirrorless body is introduced. . .That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Your true fossil,
AD

I suggest the camera builders offer a 3 month subscription to a Fitness Center.  signed: Happy Fossil

Personally I find already the 45MP too much for me and a bit of a pain in terms of storage requirements. Everything takes more space and I am trying not to spend more money on storage.  I would like a D850-like camera with 24MP-

.....

Today, the cost of storage is neglectable and processing time is (almost) the same. You can set up your D850 to 24Mpx (RAW M).

[Ilkka Nissilä]

Today, the cost of storage is neglectable and processing time is (almost) the same.

I don't agree with that. On my 8-month old laptop, changing from one 45MP file to the next and zooming in takes 10 seconds if the power saving performance reductions are in effect (to conserve battery life). If I'm outside of access to external power, in practice I can't use the full power of the computer because it would run out of battery too quickly.

For me the limit of a good browsing experience is a 1s switch between images in 100% zoom. I understand if you spend a lot of money on a computer, you can get that, but since I have no use for the extra pixels, I'd rather not spend an excessive amount of money on a technology which loses its value so quickly (and is kind of fragile, motherboards, hard drives etc. fry relatively easily).

With 20MP and 24MP files, I don't have to wait at any point. That's to me preferable. Going through hundreds of thousands or even millions of 45MP NEF is the worst kind of nightmare to me.

500000 45MP NEFs in three copies, each copy with 2:1 redundancy takes about 195 TB of storage; that would be just too expensive for me.

On top of that, edited 16-bit TIFFs with 2 layers would increase that storage requirement even further.

You can set up your D850 to 24Mpx (RAW M).

Yes, you can, but it will be softer than the output of a real 24MP camera. I don't care for pseudo-raw raw files, it is just not a good idea.

[will]

Looks like more leaked images are appearing now. https://nikonrumors.com/2018/07/23/more-leaked-picture-of-the-new-nikon-mirrorless-full-frame-camera.aspx/

It certainly has me intrigued to say the least.

[Frank Fremerey]

actually I did not test the Medium RAW files of the D850 yet and like to hear more opinions on that.

I agree with Ilkka concerning the handling of D850 files, not only on my notebooks but also on my big machine with double 8-way-Xeon and 64GB RAM I have to wait for the computer to show me the things I need to see to decide keeper or bin. I do not like this.

With 12MP on a lesser computer I could fly through hundreds of files and delete or rate in flight. Very efficient. With 24MP the process is minimally slower, but OK.

45MP is esp slow to zoom into 100% to see if I hit eyes, lips, nose or ear in the heat of the movement in a series

[MFloyd]

I'm using Lr and I have my standard previews set to the size of my screen (3360 px). So I never use the real size of my picture, except for the first 30 days where I keep 1:1 previews. I'm using a AMD Radeon Pro 460 graphic processor in Lr on my MBP 2016, and everything goes very fast: going from one 45 Mpx image to the other is immediate; and zooming in to 100% takes about one (1) second.

I have the D850 for exactly one month. It is also my first high pixel camera. So my experience is limited.

[Fons Baerken]

http://taipeigeek.blogspot.com/2018/07/exclusive-new-nikon-mirrorless-images.html

[Ilkka Nissilä]

But if you don't use the original resolution image to preview the images, how will you check that there isn't a small focus error that might happen in the heat of the action? While the D850's focusing is excellent, still if I capture 10 images of a subject that is moving there will be some that are less sharp than others.

[MFloyd]

But if you don't use the original resolution image to preview the images, how will you check that there isn't a small focus error that might happen in the heat of the action? While the D850's focusing is excellent, still if I capture 10 images of a subject that is moving there will be some that are less sharp than others.

Lr keeps the 100% images for the first month (user defined); after this period, I'm supposed to have finished the post-processing. In the present case the preview is stored on a SSD (1To); If I have to check after this period and I want to dig further than the stored 3360px image, Lr will automatically download / go back to the original (45 Mpx) file, stored on a HDD.

[Ann]

It is only the Preview in the Lr catalogue cache that gets removed after the selected period which could be 30 days but this can be set to Never).

If you re-open the RAW file after the 30 days, Lr simply refers to the saved EXIF and renders a new Preview.

Unless you are seriously short of storage space (and External USB HDs are now incredibly inexpensive) I can't imagine why anyone would choose to downsample their files before editing them.

[MFloyd]

A lot of people, including my self, are doing a quite big chunk of post production under Lr Mobile (tablet, smartphone); one of the advantages of  downsampling. And if you are editing on your main PC, you are generally working on a sample, unless you have a 8k screen.

Lr also allows to edit your pictures without the presence of the original file (HDD attached); once back home (and the HDD attached again) everything is synchronized again. But this brings us too far from the original subject 

[Ilkka Nissilä]

It seems your laptop gives similar performance in LR as my desktop when the images are on SSD. However, most of the time all the projects I am working on do not fit on the SSD. I didn't choose a Macbook Pro as I prefer the thinkpad keyboard and trackpoint for writing and editing manuscripts. The relative lack of power is a result of requirement that the laptop fits in the smaller of my camera backpacks. Anyway it is used mainly for writing as well as a screen for studio use and works fine for editing 20-24MP files, but not 45MP. My desktop would otherwise handle 45MP passably but not when there are multiple large projects. I don't want to invest more into the computers since the cost of maintaining storage, laptop+desktop, printer, software licenses etc. already are more than I would like. I can see that perhaps my laptop choice was not the best for photo editing but it was the closest match for my overall requirements. I by far prefer the controls on the Lenovo for editing documents to what is available on Macs. I find the Mac too dependent on gestures whereas there are more physical controls on the Thinkpad and the trackpoint is where my forefingers are when typing so I don't need to move my hand to use the mouse. Perhaps I naively assumed any modern computer is fast enough. Anyway the Thinkpad is brilliant for writing.