I just purchased a D850

I have just bought a good used example myself. Having regretted selling my D500 and D800 combo to fund a Z6 kit, I found the viewfinder lag and blackout of the Z6 prevented good panning for motorsport, coupled with the lackluster AF. When I was able to frame a car this resulted in many unsharp images. And Yes I tried every variation of the different AF settings. I did get very good shots when it focussed, but my hit rate was very low compared to the D800 and D500. I bought the D850 probably on the same day you did, this Sunday I will give it a run out at the Harewood hill climb, since it has the same settings as a D500 I expect it to perform superbly. I have been using a D3 whilst waiting for the Z8 to come out and buyers to trade in there old D850's.

I have a pair of D850 bodies. One I bought new and a second body I bought second hand. When I am working with a tripod the D850 is unbeatable compared to my Z7. The more button driven interface is much easier to use, especially the bracketing button I use for HDR. Shooting with the D850 is much more fluid.

There are some good bargains to be had right now as people go mirrorless.

I do prefer the Z7 for handheld stuff though.

Client selects images while shooting? That would destroy the flow of a session.

If you work with an art director they sit by the laptop and comment until they're satisfied. Doesn't help for them to like your images if they're are bright green ;-)

Well, I'm not doing that, and it is sub-optimal (but whatever works for you and said art director). Anyway, I will start or participate in a different thread about this topic which is ancillary to this one.

I hope to set up UniWB and customized Picture Controls for my D850 tonight or ASAP because I intend for my D850 to be a small step up in potential DR over my D800, and not a significant step down.

Agreed. It's suboptimal in your world, but not in mine.

I've never noticed a dynamic range difference between a D800 and D850.

Rich

That's what I would expect, using them the same way. My point is that if I use my D800 optimally and my D850 sub-optimally then it would a significant step down rather than a small step up (all of that improvement, about a fifth of a stop, comes from greater exposure at base ISO 64 rather than base ISO 100).

flow of session is a myth. for max profits and less time spent by both parties is selecting images on the fly. i sell 30 % more images
using my method.

UniWB and customized Picture Control for evaluating Raw exposure is now set up on my D850:

In the upper right is an iPhone photo of my D850's rear LCD screen showing the RGB histograms and a thumbnail of a shot I took of a photo on my desktop monitor. Below that is the Rawdigger histogram of that same file. I will be installing a customized default Picture Control for in-camera NEF conversions -- the purpose of that was discussed earlier in this thread.

No, I don't think we really agree. From an image quality standpoint it's sub-optimal -- full stop (excuse the pun). You can say it's optimal for what you are doing, in spite of the often insignificant loss of image quality, but if you dig into the shadows and you are leaving headroom unused from the Raw file then that extra stop or so of noise will be the price of choosing the "best" photo generated for the purpose of looking good prior to having the brightness adjusted during Raw conversion. The thing is that in addition to being green colored, the preview will also be too bright, so there is no reconciling a pleasant unprocessed review image with an optimally exposed Raw file.

You forget that most of the time I shoot with studio strobes and have complete control over the shadows and have all the light I need while shooting at base ISO. Even so, and also if I shoot with existing light, I prefer to underexpose a little - up to half a stop - and make the file brighter in post. This 'optimal' in my view because I can shoot more freely, not willing to overexpose, while the small increase of noise is in the end not really visible.

Optimal for you is to sacrifice some image quality, fair enough but by definition that results in sub-optimal image quality.

Modern cameras do have a great deal of image quality, and at or near base ISO it is quite extraordinary. For me, and obviously not for you and others, setting up the UniWB preset and installing my customized Picture Control makes my D850 a better tool. Also, it is easy enough to switch those features on and off and use them to evaluate the scene.

Not using UniWB is flying blind when it comes to what is going on with the red and blue channels, and the customized Picture Control shows me the true potential of the Raw exposure (so if the DR is truly challenging I may want to consider a quick two-stop bracket with the intention of blending the two exposures into a single file for processing).

If all you're interested in is technical image quality you're probably right. But I find the intrinsic image quality, what the image correspond to the viewer, of greater value. I find I can shoot more freely and can communicate better with clients if I don't use UniWB. YMMV.

When it comes to "technical" image quality, then that is what I'm interested in; but that doesn't mean that dictates every scenario. As for "intrinsic image quality," I would say that's not really a thing. There is an intrinsic quality to a photograph that is separate from its image quality, conflating the two just makes the term "image quality" meaningless.

Spin it anyway you want, you get my drift.

This is a useful quote to reply to in a follow-up to my installing UniWB and my customized Picture Control. Today I was taking some more test shots, going through all my landscape/nature lenses (all T/S except for the 15mm shift lens), and I was chimping the results to check on the exposures and I had a warning that there was an area of green channel overexposure in a few places and I set the shutter speed 1/3 of a stop faster. When I checked that file that was showing overexposure in Rawdigger the overexposure warning there was a dead-on match for what I saw on my rear LCD. My point here is that if you are chimping to avoid overexposure then why not see something more closely approximating the Raw data?

You assert that the difference is maybe half a stop, but if you are underexposing by half a stop based on the default camera settings then you are more likely one and a half stops off. Like I said above, at base ISO, if the DR of the scene isn't extreme, no big deal; but if you are pushing for more then it can make a difference. For me, I just don't want to be consistently underexposing, otherwise I can just use my D500 which is actually a better landscape camera than the 12 MP D3/D700 generation DSLRs, and it's pretty much the equal of the D3x.

I find, when really pushing the AF, the D500 is a little better than the D850, but compared to your D800 and the Z6, the D850 should be a big improvement for you.

A mea culpa here. When I was setting up my D850 to match my D500 I forgot how to change the AF settings. It had been so long since I had touched them on my D500 that I had to reacquaint myself with the control on the front left of the camera. Anyway, now they are configured the same way and maybe eventually I will see for myself if I can detect a difference in AF performance.

Regrettably, my girlfriend wants to quit doing Agility with her six year old Border Collie. That's going to take away a lot of challenging AF scenarios for me.

I bought a CFE card, and realized my firmware needed updating. I'm using the SD card as a back-up, which obviously limits the buffer -- with my XQD card I get 37 FX shots before the buffer hiccups, with the CFE card it's 31 shots, with the CFE and SD cards its 21 shots and 27 shots shooting 1.2x crop. Speaking of 1.2x crop, disengaging the SD card makes the buffer a non-issue for me (I stopped around fifty shots) with both my XQD and CFE cards. I didn't bother doing a full battery of buffer testing, including using the SD card because (in part) I'm going to use the CFE card as my primary card and use it to move files from my camera to my computer (it uploads at between 200-250 MB/s, which is about 3x faster than the SD card uploads).

I tried out the Focus Peaking, and found out the front AF button needs to be switched to Manual focus mode even with my 85mm f/2.8 NIKKOR PC-micro lens attached. Focus Peaking can be really nice, but it could be better -- shooting a uniform surface doesn't trigger it, and there are times when that's my reference point for the focus plane.