TheBiles said:
SNIP> Good thing the 5D III packs better AF than the D800, better low-light performance, and faster continuous shooting. >SNIP
I'd like to take a second to offer an opinion on which camera has the better AF system and the better low-light performance. First off, the Nikon D800 has a new AF system that is specified to autofocus with optics with maximum apertures as small as f/8; that is a simply incredible figure!!! What that means is that slow lenses, paired with teleconverters, will still autofocus. In a practical sense, that specification, how "slow" the lens can be and still deliver autofocusing that is reliable, is the TRUE measure of AF system capability--much,much,much more so than the number of autofocusing points.
As far as low-light shooting: my feeling is that the D800 and the D4, will be able to actually achieve fast,reliable autofocusing in dimmer light levels than the Canon system in the 5D-III. AND, this is the biggie, the Nikon bodies will be able to deliver their AF with sloooooow lenses, such as zooms + teleconverters. As far as shooting speeds, the D800 is a six frames per second camera, just like the 5D-III is. The D800 users simply has to move down from a FX capture size to get that 6 FPS speed.
In a way, the Nikon D800 is TWO cameras in one: an ultra-high resolution 36MP camera, as well as a 16.2 MP crop-body camera....
Right now, today, user reports and real samples for both the D800 and the 5D-III are scarce. But as far as camera that have "better autofocus", the number of AF points is not really a very good measure of AF performance. The real world determines how well a camera tends to be at focusing. Canon 's 1D Mark III was perhaps the single biggest AF flop of the entire decade, with its 39 AF points...but the actual real-world perfomance over 18 months made Canon's "pro" camera into a laughing stock, and they lost tens of thousands of shooters to Nikon, which simply had a much better AF system in multiple bodies. I expect the 5D-III will be much better than the 5D-II in terms of AF, but that's not saying much. It'll be nice to see how these two new cameras actually work in real-world situations!!!