Why not a D700?
Posted at 14:09:52
on Sun, August 10th 2008 by graham
in:
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oh my god how much have i just spent
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Since I bought my D300 several people have asked me why I didn't hold out and spend the extra money to get it's bigger, full-frame brother, the D700. After all, they've reasoned, you spent a lot of money; why not spend that little bit extra to get full frame camera with fantastic low-light performance.
Well, there were a number of reasons, and I'm going to list them here so that I can point people to this blog post rather than keep having to list them every time I get asked.
- Price. It's not a little bit extra to get a D700, it's a lot extra. Nearly £1000, in fact.
- The "oh my god how much have I spent" factor (which ties closely to point 1). For about a week after buying the D300 I woke up in a cold sweat, wondering what I'd done (then I leared to stop worrying and love my new camera, but that's another story).
- Existing gear. Over the last year I've bought quite a few lenses, most of which are DX format lenses. That means that, whilst on a D300 photographs taken using those lenses will use all 12MP of the sensor, on the FX D700 they will only use the centre 5MP of the 12MP sensor. So my image quality would suffer, unless I invested in new glass at the same time as the new body (see point 1 again).
- Skill. I don't think I have the skill at the moment to justify spending that much money on a camera (see point 1 again). If I did, I'd have saved up the extra money and bought a D3 (or whatever comes after it by the time I'd saved up). It was hard enough for my girlfriend to convince me to buy the D300. I think the D700 would have been beyond even her powers of persuasion.
Actually, when I write it like that, I can see that it really does boil down to one thing: price, and justification for the spending thereof.
So now you know.
