Last week, I nearly bought a Nikon D700 and an AF-S Nikkor 24–70mm ƒ/2.8G ED lens to go along with it. For those of you that don’t know, the total cost of those two items plus a 4GB CF card is about $4000. No, you didn’t read that wrong… $4000. I almost bought them, and I haven’t won the lottery or gotten a massive raise recently.

What could make a man spend so much money on a camera body and lens? If I were a professional photographer, such a purchase could be warranted, but I’m just an avid hobbyist, and I have a good camera body and a good set of lenses. What’s going on in this crazy head of mine? The answer, of course, is a bit complicated and highlights the difficulty many Nikon shooters are having when determining how to best spend their money on camera bodies and lenses.

The Problem

First things first: what’s wrong with my current camera? After about eight months with the Nikon D80, my impression is that it’s a great body with two major camera-specific flaws and one pseudo-flaw that applies to all cameras in its class. First, the implementation flaws:

• the D80’s meter tends to overexpose by 0.3–0.7 EVs
• performance above ISO 800 is awful; ISO 800 performance is merely usable

The first flaw is a nuisance at best. When shooting in Aperture- and Shutter-priority modes, I set the exposure bias to -0.3EVs, and I manually underexpose when in Manual mode. This keeps incorrect exposures down to a minimum, and since I shoot in RAW, performing minor exposure adjustments during post-processing is easy enough. It would be nice if the meter were more predictable, but this is not a limiting flaw by any means.

Unfortunately, the high-ISO performance is. In general, you should set your ISO to the lowest value that allows you to use the shutter speed you need for a given shot. All else being equal, lower ISO settings yield photos that have more detail, dynamic range and contrast, and have less—or at least more pleasant—noise. Unfortunately, a full quarter of the Nikon D80 photos I have in my Aperture library are taken at ISO 800 or higher. These photos tend to be shots taken in restaurants, pubs, or churches, where using a using a flash is undesirable if not outright prohibited. One might suggest that I buy faster lenses to achieve faster shutter speeds, but none of the lenses I regularly use have a maximum aperture smaller than ƒ/2.8, so I don’t really have a lot of options, particularly for wide-angle lenses. A camera with better high-ISO performance would be a boon.

The good news is that Nikon has corrected these flaws in its recent mid-range cameras, the D90 and the D300. These camera bodies don’t suffer from the same metering problems as the D80 while providing better performance across the entire ISO range. With either body, one can easily take usable shots at ISO 1600 and even shoot at ISO 3200 in a pinch.

Given all of that, the natural question is why was I considering the D700 at all? Why not just buy the much more affordable D90 or D300? To answer that, we need to look at the main functional difference between a D300 and a D700: the D300 has a DX (cropped-frame) sensor, while the D700 has an FX (full-frame) sensor. While the effect of this difference is multi-faceted, the most signficant influence it has on my photography is with regards to focal length multiplication. Due to the difference in size between a DX and FX sensor, the focal length of a lens on a DX camera body is effectively 1.5x longer than the same lens on an FX camera body. This is great if you like telephoto focal lengths, since a 200mm lens on a DX body is effectively a 300mm lens. Sadly, if you like shooting wide, you’re at a disadvantage; a 17mm lens on a DX body effectively has a focal length of 25.5mm.

The Dilemma Emerges

If you’ve been reading my blog lately, you can probably see where this is going. Over the last several months, I’ve gradually begun eschewing normal and telephoto focal lengths for wider-angle ones. A sizeable number of my recent photos have been shot at 17mm (25.5mm-effective), and I find myself wanting to shoot even wider. As a DX shooter, I have a number of good lens options available; the Tokina AF 11–16mm ƒ/2.8 and the AF-S DX Nikkor 12–24mm ƒ/4 top the list, with the former providing effective focal lengths as wide as 16.5mm at ƒ/2.8 for less than $600. However, both of these lenses are DX lenses; they can’t be used well on FX bodies without stopping down to a more narrow aperture and/or zooming in to the longest end of the lens’s focal range. It’s a foregone conclusion that, over the next few years, Nikon will bring FX sensors down to their mid-range camera bodies, and when that happens, unless I have an FX camera already, I’ll most certainly buy one. At that point, any DX lenses I own will be of little use, and I’ll have to buy FX-compatible replacements. When you buy a lens, you expect it to be useful for a long time. My dad gave me a 25+ year-old Nikkor 105mm ƒ/2.5s from the early 1980s that works perfectly on my D80. Spending $600–1000 on a lens that won’t be useful after a just few years just seems wrong. We’re mentally prepared to buy new camera bodies every few years, but lenses should last a long time.

There are ultra-wide lenses that work on both FX and DX camera bodies. The excellent AF-S Nikkor 14–24mm ƒ/2.8 ED is more than a match for the legendary primes in that focal range, but on a DX camera, it’s effectively a 21mm lens, which isn’t such a huge improvement over my current lenses.

Here’s where the D700 starts looking good. Assuming I’m going to be buying an FX camera body in the next few years anyway, I can spend an extra $800 over the D300 and have one of the best cameras available today. The switch to full-frame also means that I’ll have to replace my existing DX-only lenses—the wonderful Tamron 17–50mm ƒ/2.8 Di-II and the not-too-shabby AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 55–200mm ƒ/4–5.6—but selling those plus my D80 could offset much of the cost of the replacements. Since I rarely shoot telephoto, I would only replace the former, whose natural match is the to-die-for Nikkor 24–70mm ƒ/2.8. At that point though, I’d have spent about $4000, and I still wouldn’t have an ultra-wide lens. Adding the cost of the 14–24mm ƒ/2.8 on top of that is out of the question, so I could instead forget about the Nikkor 14–24mm and 24–70mm, and instead get the AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 17–35mm ƒ/2.8 IF-ED—a tremendous lens in its own right—and just use my 50mm and 85mm primes for normal and telephoto focal lengths.

Options

Yes, this is incredibly ridiculous. But, if it were simple, if there were a clear course of action, I wouldn’t be blogging about this at all. In my week of giving this thought, I can think of a number of options:

1. Do nothing. This is the cheapest and easiest course of action, but doesn’t actually resolve anything. I have friends who have suggested this. Some feel feel like I should build up my skills on something less-than-cutting-edge, which probably means that they don’t think I’m skilled enough for a new camera or that I’m being financially irresponsible. Either of those could very well be true, but as I hope this blog post has made clear, I’m not interested in new gear because it’s new gear; I have legitimate needs that my current gear isn’t addressing. I don’t see the virtue in intentionally limiting yourself. I vote nay.

2. Keep the D80 and gradually move to full-frame lenses. Here, I stick with the D80 and get the full-frame Nikkor 14–24mm and 24–70mm over the next couple of years. Eventually, when a mid-range full-frame camera is available, which I’ll call the D600, I have the lenses, which makes the transition to full-frame less difficult financially. In the interim, I don’t solve my low-light problems, but I have two killer lenses that range from moderately wide to moderately telephoto, and the expenses are distributed over the years. Using these lenses is uncomfortable on a D80, but my wrists will get stronger, right? I mark this as an undesirable, but prudent option.

3. Get the D400 and Tokina 11–16mm. Since I won’t die without a new camera body, I can wait up to a year for the D300’s successor—let’s call it the D400—which will almost certainly be a DX body and should have even better low-light performance. Here, I can get the Tokina ultra-wide lens now, pick up the camera body later, and get a full-frame camera in four years or so. The downside is that when the full-frame camera comes out, I have to replace my DX lenses with full-frame ultra-wide and wide-to-normal zooms. Is it just me, or is this a great example of “the poor (or cheap) man pays twice?”

4. Get the D400 and gradually move to full-frame lenses. This is just a bad idea. It’s the same as the option 2, except that I’ll buy an interim camera body before getting the D600. By the time I buy the D400 and the D600, I’ll have easily spent more than a D700, having just spread out the payment over a few years. Alas, I won’t have the ideal situation until the very end.

5. Get the D700 and Nikkor 24–70mm. This decision has me paying money up front for the ideal wide-to-normal lens and sets me up for getting the ideal ultra-wide lens, the Nikkor 14–24mm, at some point in the future. It also solves my low-light and metering issues now. It costs a lot of money all at once, but if I’m eventually going full-frame, this gets the transition over with. It could also enable me to get rid of my current primes unless their bokeh performance is significantly better than the 24–70mm’s. Finally, it should delay my purchase of another body for awhile, unless I’m crazy, stupid, or both. That hasn’t been ruled out yet.

6. Get the D700 and Nikkor 14–24mm. This is similar to the previous option, but I get the ideal ultra-wide instead of the ideal wide-to-normal first. Here, I can make use of my current primes for normal and telephoto focal lengths until I decide that I want the wide-to-normal zoom. The cost is the same as the previous option, but I would probably miss the 24–35mm focal range a lot until I bought the 24–70mm. Still, I’d have the ultra-wide.

7. Get the D700 and Nikkor 17–35mm. This is a compromise between the two previous options. I get the D700 and all it has to offer, I get a good ultra-wide-to-wide zoom, and I make good use of my current primes for normal and telephoto focal lengths. The costs are the same as the previous option, though I could end up buying either the 14–24mm and/or the 24–70mm lenses at some point in the future.

From this list, options 2 and 5 seem to make the most sense for me over the long run. The bottom line is I’m not a middle-ground sort of person; compromising when it comes to lenses is just going to lead to me buying my ideal lenses later and having to sell the other ones. Option 2 takes the long road to where I want to go and will likely save me around $1000 over about four years. Option 5 takes a shorter road. It costs more up front, but gives me better quality and low-light performance now without killing my wrists.

Knowing me, I’ll initially try out option 2, but end up with option 5. Is that such a bad thing? I’m not convinced it is. Like writing a good song or poem, taking a good photo truly makes me happy. Those acts—my acts of creativity—they’re some of the most satisfying moments in my life. If buying an expensive camera and lens enables me to do that in situations where I previously couldn’t, why not?