Nikon D850 is One of my favourite cameras of all times. Some time ago I switched from Canon to Nikon and my first Nikon camera was Nikon D700. Honestly, I was just in love with that 12-megapixel little machine. It was first Nikon's affordable option for full frame DSLR sports and wildlife photography. As a D700 then the new Nikon D850 is a Jack of all trades. A very powerful and relatively fast option for my wildlife photography. Altho I also use a Nikon D500 for a backup or "GOOD WEATHER LONG RANGE" needs. The D500 is also an amazing camera but not as versatile as Nikon D850. A few months ago I had a pleasure to use D800 and D810. These two were cameras that I used for about 3 years and they had some flows for my kind of shooting and I will explain below comparing all of the above cameras with D850. During all these years I also shot cropped sensor cameras but I am not going to talk about them. I included D500 here because it's a very special member of the family and also very powerful in every way but we will talk later about that. Now the Nikon D850! The master, the dream machine...

Using Nikon's D810 and D800 as a pair I also felt like standing on one foot. These cameras are great for still photography with no argument. The Canon users were dreaming about the quality and dynamic range of D800. When the D810 came on the market, neither Canon or any other competition had anything close as Nikon's D800's series. The picture that was produced by D810 was simply stunning.

The Canon 5DII and Canon 5DIII couldn't catch up with it. I am not going to go into the details and precisely compare these cameras but I would just say all of them were good but Nikon D810 was much better. Even when Canon released their Canon 5DIV and 5DSr the Nikon D810 still had a significant edge over newly released Canon's bodies. All of these cameras had also one thing in common - they were slow. Slow in every aspect. Slow shutter speed, slower focus, smaller buffer and slow in-camera processing time. There was a time where everyone was waiting for something new. To shoot some studio work it was ok and easy with these. All of the above cameras were able to achieve excellent results and produce stunning output but when the things were going out of control like shooting a life event or a sports game (which is also a life event I guess) all of these cameras were lacking sufficient shooting speed. Some had bad Continuous AF, some had slow Shutter Speed, some Smaller Buffer Size and some were lucking all of it together. So shutting an event you either had to obtain the very expensive and super complex D4 (1DX in Canon's world) or you would except lower quality picture and number of frames to choose from because you would need to jack-up ISO which introduced digital noise. The Nikon D4/D4s and Canon 1Dx are awesome professional machines but I just could never justify the cost of these cameras for what I was doing. Although... Once I got lucky and I both Canon 1Ds Mark III for 3K. That was once in a lifetime opportunity and that camera was also slow. Very sow. There was also some time when I turned in to Cropped Sensor alley but not for long. I tried Canon 7D and Canon 7D Mark II, then I tried Nikon D7000, D7100, D7200 and all of these had their own issues. The D7200 was best out of all of them. It had a great picture, excellent dynamic range and the speed wasn't too bad. Shooting burst was a nightmare. It was like in the bad dream. Click, click, click .... click..................click...................................gone. I really tried hard to like it and even the great picture quality of that body couldn't make me to love it. I was simply losing a lot of frames which made the whole point of my style of shooting.

With D850 is a different story. It does have a very good buffer size and it has 9 frames per second burst (with power grip). The picture is fantastic and dynamic rage is just amazing. This is one of the best Nikon’s products in many years. No matter what you shoot it will work for you well. It is a bit slower than D500 and buffer I think a bit slower and on a smaller size side but still good for wildlife and sports. I really recommend a power grip that can be adapted with this D850. Yes, and one more thing… Nikon D850 works excellent with teleconverters.

As many of you know I am a primarily a Sigma shooter and new Sigma TCs working great with Nikon D850. Also D850 can be easily converted in to 1.5X crop body, what give an additional focal length to wildlife photographer which we all appreciate a lot.

To make long story short I like to say that I do recommend D850 for all types of photography. Excellent camera by Nikon.