Switching from d800 to a mirrorless.

erkindemir · Dec 29, 2018

I ve been using the d800 for about 6 years professionally (fashion mostly). Lately I am not happy about its auto focus capabilities for shallow depth of field, plus want to have decent video capabilities. Currently have nice lenses like;

Nikon 24-70 2.8
sigma 35mm art
Nikon 85 1.8g

thinking about buying a mirrorless device, do you think, it would be a big improvement from d800 to Sony a7r iii? (with tamron 28-75mm 2.8 + sigma 85mm 1.4g art)

I am more towards to a7r iii rather than z7 because of the eye focus, but not sure about the tamron lense and change the complete set.

any ideas will be welcomed. thanks!!

lance70 · Jan 21, 2019

I shot with the D800 for 5 years or so and switched to Sony about a year ago. It will be an improvement when shooting wide open if you get nice primes. It really does help in composition to have the continuous eye AF and being able to position the model and take shots you may not take otherwise and seeing the image in the view finder immediately after is really nice.

D7K · Jan 21, 2019

I read somewhere that Nikon are working on eye af for the z7 , not sure how correct it is...

Sent from my mobile device because I’m either outside or too lazy to get my MacBook..

lance70 · Jan 22, 2019

D7K said:
I read somewhere that Nikon are working on eye af for the z7 , not sure how correct it is...

Sent from my mobile device because I’m either outside or too lazy to get my MacBook..

I heard the same thing....just depends what system you like and lens lineup that works for you.

Braineack · Jan 22, 2019

erkindemir said:
I ve been using the d800 for about 6 years professionally (fashion mostly). Lately I am not happy about its auto focus capabilities for shallow depth of field, plus want to have decent video capabilities. Currently have nice lenses like;

the D800 was plagued with back-focusing issues -- even brand new off the shelf. honestly, it's so bad and prevalent that Nikon should have recalled them -- had it happened after the D600 fiasco it probably would be a free lifetime repair today.

Once fixed, the AF module is still very stellar.

I recently purchased two D800s which both exhibited the issue. One with about 15,000 clicks on it, the other with 9,000 clicks. Unfortunately I didn't quite notice the issues on the later, and it cost me another $250 on top of the price to repair it instead of returning it like the first. They even had to replace the lens mount along with the AF module.

This is probably the issue you're having. Just google "d800 back focusing".

as far as face-detect vs eye-detect:

look how small the model's eye is in the lcd display -- face detect is doing a great job here tracking her face (not head), don't see how trying to grab a smaller target is going to help much here for accuracies sake.