Nikon D850 Week- Part Three - The Blink Of An Eye

I remember reading somewhere that the blink of an eye is around 1/40th of a second.Pretty small beans when we look at shutters in DSLR and mirror-less cameras that can fire at 1/4000 or 1/8000 of a second. I mean, Crikey - at 1/8000 you could record the time interval between when your tax refund arrives and when it goes out again in utility bills... If you read the last column post you might have been hard pressed to figure out if there was any advantage at all to using the DSLR over the mirror-less camera. You might have concluded that I was plumping for the latter exclusively - such is not the case. The sports shooter, the stage shooter, and the wedding shooter know that the Nikon still has a decided technical edge. Oh, the pictures'll look pretty much alike. Up to A3+ you'd be hard pressed to see any difference between the high-end DSLR and mirror-less - you could choose your weapon on the basis of weight and cost and benefit from the smaller system. Over A2, the bigger sensor would be the winner. But where the DSLR system is a winner is when you need to have precise control of exactly when the camera goes off. Note - all cameras go off pretty much when you tell them to these days. They all have to do some AF measuring and light metering, but they do it very quickly indeed. Where the DSLR scores is just before it fires the shutter - it shows you what is happening out in front of the lens with a far greater degree of accuracy than the mirror-less. I don't mean focusing accuracy - that's a separate issue, and the AF-S section of a mirror-less camera may indeed do a finer job of focusing than a DSLR. The image forms right on the sensor an is directly observable - unlike the mirrored image on a ground-glass screen that a DSLR uses. I mean temporal accuracy. No matter how good the advertising department of the mirror-less maker is at telling us that there is virtually no shutter lag, they are not there on the floor trying to take pictures of a dancer swirling her skirts at full speed. What the EVF of the mirror-less camera shows is what happened a very short time ago, and if we depend upon it for the timing of a shot, we get a shot of what has occurred since we decided to shoot... In practical terms it is the difference between a face clearly seen and one obscured by a twirling veil - between the peak of action and a tired come-down. The DSLR has the optical information right there on the screen as it happens. It might be a little dimmer than the EVF as it cannot be electronically boosted, but when you see the peak of the action and jab that shutter button, that is what you get. I've gotten used to the time lag of my Fujifilms and cope with it, but in the frenzy of a moment I'll lean back out of the viewfinder and just watch the action with bare eye and shoot to that. The Fujifilm X-Pro1 has an optical finder but this is dark enough to negate the lack of time lag. I want a good old-fashioned sports finder with a wire frame. None of this is of any consequence in the studio - you shoot at a leisurely pace and as long as the thing finds focus all is well. Two other points of advantage of the Nikon D850 over the Fujifilm X-T2 are the provision of touch-screen focusing and release ( for those who like it ) and the ability to shift the single AF point on the screen with the D-ring control. Of course I can do this with the joystick on both cameras as well, but people get set in their ways and may not venture off the older controls. Us youngsters, however... I must say I prefer the rectangular grid layout of the " Q " control on the Fujifilm vs the " Info " button of the Nikon. They both do the same thing - give you a summary of the most important settings that are in operation at the present time in the camera - but the Fujifilm one seems easier to understand. I do like the exposure compensation presented as a scale on the Nikon screen, but the fact that there is no dedicated dial for it is a bummer. But take these cavils with a grain of Himalayan Pink Salt - trendy, spectacular, and pretty much the same as the plain stuff anyway. The dancer is Jasmine belting it up at the FSG Pink Hafla.