This post is for anybody who considers buying a D800 and I want to point out that the extra cost connected to the purchase must be calculated into the budget. I am having the camera for less than a month now. Since it was quite foreseeable that 36 Megapixels will fill the memory cards and harddrives quickly, new storage was necessary.
Here is what I had to purchase:
- Memory card: Sandisk Extreme Pro 45 MB/s 16GB SD Card
- Memory card: Sandisk Extreme Pro 90 MB/s 16 GB CF Card
- Larger Internal harddrive for my MacBookPro: Samsung 1TB 2,5″ (the one you see on the photo above is the old 320GB Hitachi drive which used to be in my MacbookPro)
- Additional harddrive for my Drobo backup solution: Samsung EcoGreen 2TB
- Adobe Lightroom 4 (since Lightroom 3 does not read the D800 RAW files) (*)
- 2nd battery for the D800 (new battery type, can’t use the batteries of the D300s)
The stuff listed above adds up to roughly another 640 Euros which come on top of the proud camera price (in Germany 2.900 Euros, approx. 3.810 USD. And yes, the D800E is even more expensive). I am not whining about it, because I knew in advance that new storage will be necessary. But you should consider the extra cost prior to buying a new camera.
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(*) There is an educational discount available for Adobe products, then Lightroom 4 would have cost 60 Euros less. Since I work at a university I am eligible for the discount, but you can purchase only one Adobe product for the edu price per 12 months. I wanted to keep the option of buying Photoshop CS6 when it is released, therefore I paid the full price for LR4.
