Kind of a dumb Nikon D3s question.

So I'm buying a D3s shortly for a few reasons(apart from it just being an awesome body). I'm the chief photog at a daily paper and I shoot a majority of the assignment in all kinds of environments at all hours of the day and night. Because of that the noise is a big selling point. Also I'm tired of switching out lenses on my D300 and I'd rather just carry two bodies.

But I read something that has me a bit confused.

For anyone who's seen a newspaper you know it's not the highest quality of print. So I figured when I'm shooting sports I would drop in down into DX mode to get that couple extra frames per second being as in news print, especially ours, you cant tell the difference between 12mp and 5mp. But I read on Rockwell's site(I know-but that guy offers a good laugh) that in DX mode there's no autofocus. That just seems ridiculous to me but I can't find any other info stating the same or stating differently, not even in the D3s manual.

Can anyone shed some light on this for me, please? Thanks.

 

You have af, just think of it as an in camera crop. Now if you go to 11fps, you lose af, as there is not enough time between mirror raises and lowers. So, shooting sports, you will lose af, not something thats bothered me in shooting any sport as the action is usually parallel to you. However, if it does, stick with 9, its plenty fast enough, for me.

 

Thank you for the quick answer, Alex.

 

Oddly enough, it sounds like that's the case. If you look on page 104 of the manual, it is described there. It's a little confusing, so I'll leave the interpretation to you.



http://www.nikonusa.com/pdf/manuals/noprint/D3S_ENnoprint.pdf

 

Alex is a bit quicker than I...oh well.

 

Apparently you have a keener eye than I when looking through the manual, Moe. Haha. I was searching and searching though it and didn't see that.

 

Yup, its just because you are flipping the mirror up so often that the AF module can't get a read, so its a bit of a trade off. Parallel action, or daylight action usually doesn't pose a problem, as they aren't moving out of the infocus area.

 

No personal experience () but from my reading you loose focus tracking @ Max fps.

Evidently cropping the image, reacquiring and then refocusing 11 times in a second every second is a bit much even for the D3s.

 

Crop is just after the fact, it discards the excess info so as to reduce processor load, and allow for greater through-put. Maybe the D4 will feature af at 11fps, but as of now it is a physical limitation.

 

When I shoot baseball I can do manual focus but most of the other sports I'll stick with 9fps and AF.

Thanks for the help again. I've been looking on my downtime most of the day and couldn't get a concrete answer on what Rockwell meant.

 

What sports do you shoot?

 

Baseball, soccer, water polo, swimming, softball, track, football, tennis...pretty much every high school sport.