D850M Pictures

Lloyd Chamber (www.diglloyd.com) did a month long extensive review with our D850M. Some of his comments:

Lloyd Chambers:

WOW! I have never seen image quality this high from any 35mm camera before. Image quality is outstanding in a single shot at ISO 64 on the Nikon D850 monochrome, but I’m extending that via focus stacking and in some cases, frame averaging.
I hereby raise my estimation of equivalent megapixels to 100+ megapixels, and still I think the detail exceeds anything I captured with the Fujifilm GFX100. That is a little unfair perhaps since the GFX100 is a Bayer matrix color camera, but there it is.

How can that be? My educated guess is that it is a combination of:
   •   Monochrome capture with no debayering yields acute per pixel capture accuracy.
   •   Outstanding lens performance definitely considerably better total sharpness from lenses like the Zeiss Milvus 35mm f/1.4 and Zeiss Otus 55mm f/1.4 APO-Distagon (and others) than the Fujifilm GF lenses can deliver.
   •   Notching up lens performance using filtration that eliminates spectral blur (eg blue/red/green not focusing quite exactly the same). This also increases real (actual) depth of field to close to the theoretical amount, particularly in the outer zones.
   •   Seemingly reduced effects of difraction (for reasons I don’t understand).
   •   Extremely low noise, particularly at ISO 31.

The monochrome sensor and its freedom from debayering reveal the native performance of the lens without any intervening software behaviors. And I seem to have mastered the exposure and raw conversion side of things. The quality is breathtaking. I am now actively pondering how to acquire a D850m of my own.
There is just no getting around the fact that a true monochrome sensor kicks the crap out of a Bayer matrix sensor (far more detail, far less noise), and because the D850m sensor is “only” 45 megapixels, diffraction losses are negligible, even out to f/8. I'll put this sharpness up against the Fujifilm GFX100 any time. Of course, it is monochrome, not color.

I am not shooting a secret 183 megapixel camera. Just a Nikon D850 monochrome. Images like these surpass in detail and tonality and low noise anything I’ve ever shot on any camera of any resolution. Well I have not shot (yet) the PhaseOne IQ180 or its monochrome sibling, so I’ll exclude those for now.
The monochrome sensor and its freedom from debayering reveal the native performance of the lens without any intervening software behaviors. And I seem to have mastered the exposure and raw conversion side of things. The quality is breathtaking. I am now actively pondering how to acquire a D850m of my own.
Detail and textural rendition of the Nikon D850m are far ahead of an unmodified Nikon D850, with such clean definition that the impression remains photo-realistic even upon enlargement.

The quality level with these images is astonishing.

Jason W:

That is an incredibly impressive image Lloyd. Whatever tonality issues I saw before are not there. Spectacular quality. Rough bayer megapixel equivalent? 70? The tire image with the frame averaging is otherworldly.

The cumulative total effect of zero noise, zero debayering errors, and extreme detail without sharpening combines to create something very striking because there is no interference with the observation of the subject. It's what in the audiophile world you would call transparency. What comes across is not the artifacts of reproduction but the original object.

The Angry Photographer:

The only thing that approached this was a low ISO 4 x 5 black and white negative that was perfectly exposed under ideal circumstances.

You don’t see these types of silvers or silver tonality from a conventional camera.

Look at how much more information we have in the shadows. Do you see all tonal graduations? Do you see how the stock D850 looks out of focus? It’s not. Repeat after me - ‘Image Fidelity’.

Below are some samples from Lloyd Chambers that are been down sampled. Full resolution pictures and his extensive review can be seen at here. Some of his pages require a paid subscription.

100% Crop

Stitched Image Panorama

100% Crop. Can you even locate the spot in the panorama?

100% Crop. This image has sole!