The Nikon D850 & May God Help Us

The Nikon D850

Every so often the camera industry produces an object so flawlessly competent that you want to lie down in a darkened room and mourn the death of human error. The Nikon D850 is that object. It is magnificent, and I loathe it.

Here is a machine that resolves 45.7 million pixels of pitiless truth. Point it at a human face and it hands you back not a portrait but a forensic report — every pore, every burst capillary, every lie you’ve ever told, rendered with the clinical glee of a pathologist who rather enjoys his work. Nikon has thoughtfully removed the optical low-pass filter, by which they mean they have removed the last merciful thing standing between you and your own reflection.

It fires at nine frames a second, allowing you to record your worst moment from nine marginally different angles, in case the first eight failed to do it justice. The files are immaculate from ISO 64 to 25600, which is to say they have all the warmth and forgiveness of a tax audit.

And then comes the masterstroke. Built into this peerless slab of engineering is a film negative digitiser — a feature that exists solely so the most accomplished DSLR ever made can devour the negatives from the cameras you actually love. You feed your Tri-X into the front and it returns a sterile, perfect file with all the soul of a mortuary drawer. It is not a camera. It is an undertaker with a battery grip, and it has come for your hobby.

The body weighs as much as a small smug dog. The memory cards cost more than a weekend in Margate. And the photographs, God help me, are the finest I have ever taken — which is the whole problem. A picture with nothing wrong with it has nothing whatsoever to say. The D850 has eliminated the grain, the light leak, the wandering thumb, and in doing so has eliminated the one thing that made a photograph worth looking at: the evidence that a fallible idiot was holding the camera.

Buy it and become technically perfect and creatively dead. Or keep your battered Olympus, miss focus, and remain gloriously, defiantly human.