Should the Nikon D850 Be Your Next Camera?

The Nikon D850 is a beast of a camera, packing a lot of specs into one package. A lot of people were waiting to see what Nikon announced and many believe the Nikon D850 raises the bar for the competition.

Can you handle the Nikon D850? More importantly, should you bother with it?

While I think this is an outstanding camera, you need to look on the other side of the specs to understand what it may cost you to own a D850. Let's start with a look at the features.

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Key Specifications:

* 45.7MP BSI CMOS sensor

* 7 fps continuous shooting with AE/AF (9 with battery grip and EN-EL18b battery)

* 153-point AF system linked to 180,000-pixel metering system

* UHD 4K video capture at up to 30p from full sensor width

* 1080 video at up to 120p, recorded as roughly 1/4 or 1/5th speed slow-mo

* 4:2:2 8-bit UHD uncompressed output while recording to card

* 1 XQD slot and 1 UHS II-compliant SD slot

* Battery life rated at 1840 shots

* 3.2″ tilting touchscreen with 2.36M-dot (1024×768 pixel) LCD

* Illuminated controls

* 19.4MP DX crop (or 8.6MP at 30fps for up to 3 sec)

* SnapBridge full-time Bluetooth LE connection system with Wi-Fi

* Advanced time-lapse options (including in-camera 4K video creation)

Here's how I translate the other side of some of these features.

45.7MP BSI CMOS sensor

My main camera now is the with a 36 megapixel camera. That's the model I picked after shooting with the Nikon D700 with a 12 megapixel sensor. As you can guess, three times the megapixels means larger files.

That means fewer photos on your memory card, and more space consumed on your hard drive. If you upload to an online service, it takes a bit longer to transmit. It also fills up the buffer in your camera faster than small files would.

More megapixels means more…well, everything that handles megapixels.

There is semi-good news. Apparently you can choose to save your RAW files in a smaller megapixel size. Cool. Now who's going to buy a 46 megapixel camera just to shoot it like a 24 megapixel camera? You may as well get a if that's what you need.

7 fps continuous shooting with AE/AF (9 with battery grip and EN-EL18b battery)

Seven frames per second continuous shooting speed is very impressive for a 46 megapixel camera. Add the battery grip to get nine frames per second and some folks think this may be a good camera for sports photographers.

The Nikon D700 shoots at 5 FPS, up to 8 FPS with the batter grip, and it's only a 12 MP camera. Shooting at 9 FPS is really nice, until you compare it with the at 12 FPS. The Canon 1Dx Mari IV shoots even faster at 14 FPS.

Now those are the cameras you use to shoot sports. They cost more than double, but sports photography is not a cheap endeavor.

Let's say that you decide this is the right camera for your sports photography. Do you need 46 megapixels for those shots? Good thing you can shoot at a lower resolution.

My photography is primarily portrait and travel. These speeds mean nothing to me. During a portrait session, I turn off continuous mode.

When I take travel photos, it's common for me to use bracketing. I'm never really in a hurry, though. The subjects I'm photographing aren't running away from me. It's not like I see a pretty landscape and think that I need to hurry up and get more frames per second or I'll lose the shot.

On the other hand, this could be quite useful for street shooters or concert photo...