Do I need a d800 for landscapes?

Mark twiglet

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I shoot weddings and landscapes mostly with a d600! I want to either ...... Get another d600/610 or get a d800 and use the d600 as a back up/ second body! A mate of mine says the 600 is plenty good enough but is a d800 worth the extra cost and file size?
 
Yes the D800 will be a great camera for landscape and the file size shouldn't be a concern unless you have an antique PC :)
 
It will depend both on your lenses and your PC.

I have the canon 1Ds MkII and my JPEG files are about 10-12Mb but when turned into TIFF files for editing they are about 97Mb.

I use an older editing program but also downloaded a free copy of Photoshop 7 and both can cope with me loading up to 10-12 TIFF files with no problem.

But the RAW files from the D800 are 75Mb or so and TIFF files about 205Mb so I would definitely think you would need a reasonably fast PC.

The other problem is lenses and you definitely will need top quality lenses for that camera - lower quality lenses simply won't cut it.

Personally I would definitely say stay with the camera you have - the specs are good enough for almost anything you could want to do.
 
You asked if you "need" a D800... the answer to that is almost certainly no.

The next question is "will a D800 benefit me?" And the answer to that is more complex... The short answer is "probably not often, but for landscapes maybe."

*IF* you can use a low enough ISO (should be able to), AND you have very sharp lenses (?), AND you can use wider apertures like ≤ f/8 (?), AND you can use higher SS's/better technique (tripod/remote release/etc), THEN the recorded file should have better quality/benefits than just about anything else available (DSLR's). And THEN, if you use that to print/display larger than you can with the D600, you will likely see notable benefits.

If anything in the above chain is not optimal, then the potential benefits of the D8xx drop significantly. And I have shown numerous times that if you use a D8xx to do "exactly the same thing," and for smaller display/prints, there's very little to distinguish a D8xx image from a 12MP D750/16MP D4 image.

Even when some of the chain fails, there can still be *some* benefit to a D8xx image file.... i.e. at minimum ISO there isn't much that can record/recover as wide of a DR, even if the image doesn't take advantage of the resolution potential.

You said you shoot primarily weddings and landscapes. In that case I do think a D8xx is a good addition to your D600, but I don't think it should relegate the D600 to "backup status." They are different tools and in many cases the D600 will work just as well, possibly even better (if only for the smaller files).
 
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I already have the glass required....... Apart from a 20mm 1.8 I'd like to own!
 
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