This post is probably going to sound very biased ...... but I am still going to post my findings on how amazing the D850 RAW & JPEG FINE file quality really is.
Today I was out looking for some birds to photograph and ended up photographing dragonflies flying again.
This was the shot of the session (see below)
Captured at 600mm angle of view , the Nikon D850 was set to DX mode so this image only has 20 Megapixels i.e only 40% of full resolution. Image Capture Settings : ISO800 , 1/3200s, f6.3
Just to show that the D850 and the 80-400 f4.5/5.6 combo did nail the focus, the following image is the screenshot of the JPEG image straight out of camera magnified to 300%. and you can see that the focus was spot on and details are still pretty good (at least good enough for me to work with)
I have this "magnification" process (which involves cropping and re-sizing) using Photoshop which I use regularly. I decided to push this 20MP JPEG FINE file of the Dragonfly in flight to the maximum !! I wanted to see how much I could "magnify" without loosing image quality.
Well, here is the final result after my "magnification" process back to 20MP & after going through my regular post processing workflow (1st image) , the next image shows the screenshot when the processed image was magnified to 200%
All I can say is that I am totally "blown" away by the image quality I can "extract" from the digital file of the D850 even after such gross magnification. I have used this "maginification" process so many times on the digital files from my Nikon Full Frame cameras ranging from the D3, D4, Df, D800 and D810 that I am very familiar with the image quality I can extract.
I can't prove it scientifically but I find that I can push the "magnification" process even more with the digital files from the D850.
I truly believe that the results my "magnification" workflow can produce of course depends on the starting pixel quality of the source file and to me the D850 produces truly superb digital files which I can work with whether its the full frame or crop format.
The pixel quality of the digital files are also directly related to the CMOS sensor which also means to say that this NEW BackSide Illuminated (BSI) CMOS sensor which has been incorporated for the very 1st time in the Nikon D850 is something really very special !!
So try cropping your D850 images to get more "magnification" and see if you see the differences yourself.
Happy shooting !!