IN THE FIELD
Launched in 2012, the Nikon D800 arrived with a spectacular specification including a 36MP sensor. John Gilbey looks back on life with the D800, and what this DSLR still has to offer
It was the spring of 2015, and I desperately needed a new DSLR body. The Nikon D300 I’d been using since 2008, with only a 12MP sensor, was beginning to look a bit anaemic and I’d had an invitation to a writer’s workshop in Laramie, Wyoming. While I understand that size isn’t everything, I needed a camera that would be capable of helping to fund the trip, which I wanted to extend into a three-week odyssey across the American West, ending at some old haunts in San Francisco.
The Nikon D800 had been launched in 2012, nearly three years before, and while a new one was still out of my reach, second-hand prices were beginning to become affordable. After a lengthy search, I picked up a low-mileage D800 for around £1,100 – and it quickly proved itself to be a great companion. After a month of familiarisation, which scarily involved a couple of weddings, I packed my new friend up with a careful selection of Nikkor prime lenses and headed off to the United States. We have been together ever since.
Design and handling
As a classic example of the Nikon DSLR, the D800’s design and layout will be immediately familiar to most Nikon users. Despite having been around for over a decade, few things about the design are showing their age, except for minor details. The 36.3MP sensor provides images up to 7360x4912 pixels, giving the photographer plenty of space for cropping. Meanwhile the core sensitivity runs from ISO 100 to ISO 6400, and the image quality is exceptional at the lower end of the range. The autofocus system is based on TTL phase detection and offers 51 focus points.
Typically for Nikon’s semi- professional range of DSLRs, the build quality is of a very high standard, being based around a magnesium alloy shell. This gives the D800 a weight of around a kilo when fitted with an EN-EL15 battery, but no lens. This is a good deal more than a consumerlevel DX-format DSLR, but the resulting body is extremely robust and has a reassuring degree of heft. The same battery is used in the D850 and several of the Z-series mirrorless cameras, so it should remain available for a good while to come.
In terms of media, there are two memory card slots. One is a UHS-1 compliant SD card slot, which accepts both SDHC and SDXC variants. I use this with 64GB SanDisk cards, the largest recommended by Nikon. The other slot is for CompactFlash cards, which is probably of li
