The Nikon D800 is fucked

Man, what a week, what a week. I haven’t partied so hard in quite a while. I assume most of you noticed I wasn’t exactly what you’d call sober when I did the last two posts about the D800. I’m telling you, the champagne was flowing here at Canon USA. At the end of the night I was practically peeing champagne. Some of you have asked for me not to post when I’m drunk, and I’ve decided I owe you at least one post where I’m reasonably sober.

Nikon morons put a heavy load on the blog

As you can see from the graph above, Nikon morons swarmed the servers when news about the shitty image quality of the D800 got out. That was an FCW exclusive as far as I’m concerned. This kind of stuff usually only happens when The Lord of the Speedlights links to your website.

I’m happy to see that amidst the crowd of Nikon morons, there are actually still people who are willing to be honest to themselves and not fool themselves about the absolutely god-awful color banded, color dithered, noisy piece of shit images from the D800. Comments like these give me hope for the future of mankind:

Congrats to Canon USA! You fucktards somehow convinced Nikon Inc that video is more important than stills. Now all of us Nikon users have no real upgrade path. These cameras that Nikon came out with HAD, HAD. to have been engineered by an ex-Canon engineer. Wonderful. Thanks Canon.

And this:

Chuck, all sarcasm aside, this post is very funny! And more than that, you’re bloody right.  I’m a D700 shooter, I’ve spent lots of my hard-earned cash on nice Nikkor glass, and now I’m fucked. All I wanted was good HD video, better ISO performance, keep 8fps, and dual card slots. Don’t know about anyone else, but I’ll be shagged if I’ve got $6000 dollars to spend on a D4. It’s a complete frigging cock-up.

———————–

I’m in the same boat, Andyj. I just hope my D700 doesn’t flake out anytime soon — it still takes great, sharp images with that nice Nikkor glass. My “upgrade path” is going to be to a used D3s whenever they start hitting Craigslist at reasonable prices (that is, not the $4000+ the go for on ebay) as people move up to the D4.

And this:

Hi Fake Chuck   Just wanted to express my dismay at how idiotic some of the respondents to this post are.   What’s up with all the dorks calling you a “canon fanboy” like that’s some sort of mortal insult? They need to go back to school and learn some proper vocabulary.   “OMGGGZZZ CANON FANBOY!!!!!!!1111oneoneoneone” – they need to get a life and learn some english.

Keep up the good work and telling it like it is!

You get the idea. But in general, the comments section of the previous posts make for some interesting, but not exactly light, reading. We’ve got Al Qaeda fighters all the way from Afghanistan commenting in there, it’s nuts.

I promised to look at the high ISO samples of the D800, which Nikon didn’t include on their own website BTW, for very obvious reasons. I’ll be comparing this Nikon D800 image with this Canon 1DX image, both at ISO 800. Just take a look at this:

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Click on the image to open it in actual size. These are 100% crops. Just look at the noise in the D800 image. That’s just nasty. And this is apart from the color banding and color dithering artifacts which I had already discussed previously. Now some of you Nikon morons are going to be quick to mention how this comparison isn’t fair and how the D800 image should be downsampled to the 18MP size of the 1DX. And according to those morons, the D800 image quality will actually be comparable to the 1DX in that case. Quite why one would buy a 36MP camera only to resize the images to 18MP for better image quality is beyond me. That sounds like Nikon moron logic to me. But let’s check it out:

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Nope. Doesn’t look comparable to me. The D800 image at 18MP still looks fucking awful compared to the 1DX image. And in fact, even the 1DX image upsampled to 36MP looks much better compared to the piece of shit D800 image:

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Like I said before, I’m willing to bet my left nut that an upsampled 1DX image will look much better compared to a D800 image at 36MP. The 1DX image will look cleaner and in fact, if you try to make the D800 image look similar, you’ll be losing some of the detail that you claim to have captured along with the noise. Not to mention the fact that the D800 image has far less dynamic range compared to the 1DX, and also suffers from color banding and dithering artifacts which you’ll have to clean in post. And the thing is, the D800 has this shit even at ISO 100!! Me, I’d rather have clean images from the 1DX with the extra dynamic range to play with.

Oh god...

Just look at the 100% crop of an ISO 6400 image from the D800 above. That’s some pretty nasty chroma noise. This is the worst kind of noise you can have in your images. I haven’t seen this shit since the late 1990s when the first digital cameras were coming out.

But I do have a confession to make. And one of the commenters in a previous post almost got it right. Nikon was set up by Canon. Maeda is fucking brilliant!! Remember the conference call I had with Maeda, where we discussed the D800 and the 5D Mark III? Maeda kept insisting that they would continue adding megapixels on the 5D Mark III, no matter the image quality issues, and Nikon would not be able to compete. As it turns out, he wasn’t serious. This was just to get Nikon to fuck up and have them release a D800 with insane amount of megapixels and shitty image quality. If you don’t believe me, just listen to the conference call below.

I never thought I’d say this, but Maeda is a fucking genius!!