Cameras redux…

Hi birders,

In January of this year I posted about cameras – firstly indicating that I intended to upgrade Ruth’s Canon gear and secondly that I was considering abandoning the Nikon camp and jumping ship to Canon. Quite a number of people responded both on birding-aus and to me directly, so I thought I would just update everyone on the decisions I made, and the reasons why.

Firstly though, thanks to Jen Spry for telling me about www.canonrumors.com and www.nikonrumors.com – I don’t know why I didn’t know about these sites before! Also, thanks to all those that responded with helpful advice, Dave Stowe, Bob Gosford, Alistair McKeough, Sonja Ross, Damian Kelley, Richard Baxter, Allan Richardson, Chris Sanderson, and to Martin Cachard for sending amazing pics of Blue-faced Parrot-finches (which I have not yet seen!)

To refresh your memory, Ruth had a Canon 350D and a Canon 100-400mm L IS lens. I was tossing up between the 60D, 7D and 5D Mark II. The consensus was that the 7D was the best camera for birding, having the smaller sensor with the crop-factor, still a high pixel density and a good high frame rate. I read plenty of reviews, and all seemed to agree with that assessment. I took into account the fact that the 7D (and the 5D) were due to be replaced this year – but in the end I decided that I didn’t want to wait, and bought Ruth a 7D. I must say that I am particularly impressed with the camera – the image quality is amazing, and it works well with her existing 100-400mm lens. From Ruth’s point of view, there was a slight learning curve as she liked the “sports”, “landscape” and “portrait” settings on her previous camera – so now she has to relearn aperture priority mode!

I had a Nikon D200S and a Nikon 80-400mm VR zoom – and I was not at all happy with the combination – to my eye, the images were always soft, regardless of the aperture. In the end, I decided that I wasn’t going to switch from Nikon to Canon as I considered that I had too much invested in Nikon (lenses other than my 80-400, for instance). So my first purchase was a lens to replace the 80-400 – this seemed to be the most important consideration. Ultimately I was tossing up between the Nikon 300mm f/2.8 VR and the Sigma 120-300 f/2.8 OS. Whilst two people I respect advised against third-party (ie. Sigma) lenses, I did a lot of research, and read a lot of reviews. The Sigma was well reviewed and image quality was compared favourably with both the Nikon 300mm, even wide open, and the Nikon 200-400mm VR. I had a look at both lenses at Michaels in Melbourne and was very impressed with the Sigma. Ultimately I ended up buying the Sigma from Teds in Melbourne (a special order) – the cost was LESS than I could buy one for on eBay – which also means that I get an Australian warranty. Incidentally, the price of this lens is only a few hundred dollars more than the Nikon 80-400. One thing I need to say about the Sigma, it is heavy! For those of you that use the big prime glass (300, 400, 500, 600mm) this would hardly be a surprise, but for those of us that have or had the Canon 100-400 or Nikon 80-400 the difference in weight is considerable. Since the Sigma is only 300mm I figured that I needed teleconverters, so I bought both the Sigma 1.4x and the Sigma 2x (it is important to use the Sigma teleconverters and not the Nikon or other third-party ones with this lens). The lens is absolutely pin-sharp, fully open with the 2x teleconverter. This is a great lens!

In addition to replacing the Nikon 80-400mm lens, I also replaced my D200S – opting for the full-frame D800 – at almost 37 megapixels! This camera has only just been released and I was on a waiting list for it, both at Teds in Melbourne, and also at Borges in Port Melbourne (really my favourite camera store now!) Borges came through with the goods, so I bought it there. Once again the price was much less than I could get it on eBay, so well done Nikon and the local camera stores for their excellent pricing. This camera is simply amazing. Words cannot describe the image quality well enough – for instance, I shot yesterday at ISO 1000 because it was so dull. I could never have used ISO 1000 on the D200, the noise even at ISO 800 would have rendered the pictures almost useless. At ISO 1000 on the D800, the only way to see any noise is to zoom in to 100%. I have heard all sorts of “horror stories” about the effects and artefacts that a high pixel count can cause on images, and I must say that I have not found this to be true at all. The D800 is a full-frame camera – and I was advised that this was not necessary (or indeed desirable) for bird photography – mainly because I would lose the advantage of a 1.5x crop factor. In actual fact, the pixel count is so high in the D800, that I can still aggressively crop the resultant images and still have a high resolution image that I can blow up! This is simply the most amazing camera I have ever owned – if there are two disadvantages to it they would be that the frame rate is only 5fps (presumably because of the time required to manage and save 37mp images!) and secondly that as a full-frame camera, DX (digital crop-factor) lenses are no good with it – meaning that I had to replace my brilliant Tokina 12-24mm wide-angle zoom with the Nikon 14-24mm.

Paul Dodd

Docklands, Victoria

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