Help me decide.....Nikon 500f4 or D3S ?

[Bob Miller]

I currently have a Nikon 200-400 mm telephoto ( and a D-300 body) and am trying to decide if my next purchase should be the 500 mm f4 or whether I should upgrade to a pro body like the D3S. I am considering the D3s because of higher ISO and faster autofocus and full frame clarity but am concerned about losing the 1.5x magnification crop factor. My shooting habits are pretty general but i do spend most of my time lately anyway doing wildlife. Any help would be most appreciated :confused:

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Bob The lens you will keep for many years and will hold the value ... go for the lens !!!

[arash_hazeghi]

Go for the lens.

[LouBuonomo]

Glass lasts....

[Lance Peters]

Quality Glass holds its value very well - go for the glass

[Todd Frost]

I agree that glass would hold value and last many years, but you already own the best tele zoom available. I have a similar decision to make although I have a 400 2.8 so have the advantage when adding tc's. I shoot with a D300, D2h and D200. I am looking at D3, D3s, D700, D3x but will wait to see if rumors of D900 or D700x or s come to pass. If you are like me (Washington state is very dark in winter) shooting @ iso800 regularly the added iso capabilities are very much welcomed. This is not a knock on previous posters but knowing that they own the full blown pro bodies with the better iso capabilities already may sway their advice. Maybe that should be posed as a question to the above posters as I would be curious if it does. Good luck on your decision, mine is going to be the body.
Todd

[Danny J Brown]

Lens!!!!! You'll love the 500, even though you have a 200 - 400 already. You already have a great camera in the D300, one that many people would love to own.

[John Chardine]

Bob- As Roger Clark often points out, the crop factor of a particular sensor does not affect magnification (hope I get this right Roger). This effect is only apparent and not real. What is real, and relevant here is the pixel density of the sensor. This determines how many pixels are used to render specific detail in your image. However, pixels are not all created equal and the larger they are, the lower the noise. It is worth remembering that the current Nikon pro bodies (except the D3x) have pixel counts equivalent to a 5mp camera if the sensor was trimmed to a 1.5 crop factor. However, from the images I have seen, these pixels are not noisy and the images produced are very clean even at higher ISOs.

I shot eagles with my 5D/500 last weekend and I missed the "reach" not because the 5D is full frame but because its relatively low pixel density, thus not allowing the crop and magnification I was used to in my 50D, now sold to make way for a mk IV.

[Desmond Chan]

I shot eagles with my 5D/500 last weekend and I missed the "reach" not because the 5D is full frame but because its relatively low pixel density, thus not allowing the crop and magnification I was used to in my 50D, now sold to make way for a mk IV.

All right. Could somebody explain this. How come I find a large-crop image from a full-frame camera actually appear to contain more details than one from the crop-factor camera?

And if I may shamelessly use one of my big-time cropped images to illustrate what I means :) This was shot with a D700 using the lowly 70-300 f4.5-5.6 VR @ 300 ISO 3200 f8 1/250s. If this were shot with my D300, I believe the result would be worse with this kind of crop (not only because of the noise, color depth and tonal gradation but the details would not look as good).

To Bob: generally speaking, get the lens first. But you're the one who knows what you need the most.

[Harshad Barve]

If I were you ,

Gone for glass , gets you better reach but would have selected 600mm , as you have mighty fine 200-400 which takes 1.4x easily gives you reach of 560mm at 5.6

[Roger Clark]

Hi,
John got it right. The differences people see in images is largely due to pixel density (or pixel pitch). I've explained crop factor here:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/cropfactor

The D300 has a pixel spacing of 5.5 microns and the D3s has 8.45 micron pixels. With the same focal length lens you will get 5.5/8.45 = 0.65x less pixels (measuring linearly) on a subject with the D3s. It has nothing to do with the crop factor (described on the web page above).

Roger

[Doug Brown]

I'd go for the glass. Your 200-400 on a full-frame body is going to come up short in the reach department, and quality glass never seems to age.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

This is a generic question. It is like the marketing decision. Whether to increase penetration in the existing markets and increase market share by increasing your product range or whether you want to focus on expanding to other geographies with your existing portfolio of goods.

If you invest in a 500 mm lens. It will give you slightly more reach. With a 1.4x TC on you can get a max 560mm from your 200-400mm. With a 500mm +1.4x you can get you 700mm. Probably you would be able to get some smaller birds or more skittish birds with a longer focal length. So it is kind of expanding to a new territory.

The D3s would give you great low light ability. So with the same reach, you can get better images of the subjects you are currently photographing.

If you are interested in video then the D3s will give you that ability. Ofcourse, the video is not the full HD that you get in Canon. However, you can take some nice low light videos.

There is no single answer. It is upto you to decide based on your photography.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Van Hilliard]

I too think the wisest choice is to put the money in glass. I see my D2X of a few years ago being worth less than $1000 even though I paid nearly $5000. Meanwhile, the 200-400 I bought at the same time for about the same price is selling used for near my purchase price. Today's cheaper D300s in many ways outperforms the pro-level and expensive D2X. The lens is as useful and valuable as the day I bought it.

[Bob Miller]

Thanks everybody for your advice! I have been going back and forth for days now.....Looks like I will probably go for the glass and wait a bit longer for the pro body. Thanks again!

[Deborah Harrison]

I agree with the other responses - I was in the same situation and got the glass!! If you want the higher ISO and/or larger buffer of the D3 you can get a good quality 2nd hand one as new models are announced. The lens will last and, if you need to resell you'll recoup most of your cost. I was in the same situation and calculated that it was better to buy the lens and I'd save over the cost of renting it, even for only a few weeks a year.

[Doug Brown]

With regard to high ISO performance, I don't think we're going to be seeing many world class bird photos shot much above ISO 3200. Birds look their best in good light, and feather detail is much less forgiving of high ISO noise than is human skin detail.