There are four things I like about the Nikon D800…and one thing that’s a lit­tle iffy.

I know. I’m not exactly the first per­son to get a Nikon D800. It’s not as excit­ing now as when it was brand new and only a few folks actu­ally put their hands on it. How­ever, it’s new to me. Per­haps it’s the it’s more accu­rate to call this my first impres­sions of the Nikon D800 — refurbished.

My cam­era arrived on Mon­day, which was actu­ally a day ear­lier than the UPS Track­ing info said I should expect it. It was good luck that I was home, since my sig­na­ture was required.

I some­what anx­iously tore open the enor­mous ship­ping box, waded through a river of bub­ble wrap in search of a Gold Box. Except, it wasn’t Gold. Appar­ently the refur­bished prod­ucts come in a Sil­ver box, so you’re not going to pawn them off on some unsus­pect­ing per­son as new material.

The box was the only thing that was dif­fer­ent than open­ing a brand new prod­uct. The D800 body itself looked flaw­less. All of the asso­ci­ated mate­r­ial and doc­u­men­ta­tion were wrapped in the same man­ner as a brand new prod­uct. Aes­thet­i­cally, you’d never have any rea­son to think of this as a used product.

Some folks are fear­ful of the notion of a refur­bished cam­era. Why is it refur­bished? Was it used heav­ily? Was it defec­tive? Why wasn’t this cam­era sold as new?

Nikon doesn’t tell you why the cam­era was refur­bished. My sales guy at Ado­rama told me that the cam­eras were demo units at trade shows, per­haps had some firmware issues resolved. Mostly, they were issues that didn’t have a lot of heavy use before the cam­era was sold as refurbished.

I don’t know what hap­pens when Nikon refur­bishes a cam­era, except that it must pass the same qual­ity con­trol checks as a new unit. How­ever, I was curi­ous to see how many times the shut­ter had been fired on this cam­era. I took a photo (a very ugly one) and uploaded it to Cam­era Shut­ter Count. I fired a total of three shots with this cam­era before the one I uploaded, so sub­tract those from the total. Are you ready to see how much this beast was used before I got my hands on it?

That’s right, boys & girls. There were 55 clicks on this cam­era before it got in my grubby hands. No won­der it looks new.

D800 Fea­tures That Caught My Eye

The Nikon D800 looks remark­ably sim­i­lar to my D700. They’re both black with a lot of knobs, but­tons and dials. How­ever, there are a cou­ple of inter­est­ing features.

1: There are four but­tons on the top-​left knob instead of three. The extra but­ton is to eas­ily change your Auto­ex­po­sure Bracket set­ting. On my D700, I had to pro­gram one of the front func­tion but­tons to do this job. Now it’s hear on top.

2: The body cap has a much stronger grip. The cap on my D700 would eas­ily twist off in the cam­era bag, but the D800 cap has a manly grip.

3: There are only two focus selec­tion set­tings instead of three. On my D700, I have a choice of Con­tin­u­ous, Sin­gle or Man­ual focus. With the D800, it’s AF or Manual.

4: There’s a Live View but­ton on the back of the cam­era. Very con­ve­nient. On the D700, you had to change a dial on the upper-​left knob to select your shut­ter behav­ior. I like this but­ton much better.

5: Time-​Lapse shots can be saved as a video. You don’t have to export a bunch of sin­gle images and merge them together in post-​processing. You can still do that if you want more con­trol, but it’s a cool fea­ture to have time-​lapse as a video file right out of the camera.

Addi­tional Accessories

I also bought an MB-​D12 bat­tery grip and a Really Right Stuff L-​Plate for the D800 & grip. Every­thing arrived on Mon­day. The only thing I didn’t con­sider was that the bat­tery for this cam­era is dif­fer­ent than the one I used in my D700, so I’ll have to pick up a spare.

The MB-​D12 is one expen­sive grip — $380 or so. Yes, there are less expen­sive alter­na­tives from 3^rd par­ties, but I didn’t want them. I want and expect my grip to have dura­bil­ity and com­pat­i­bil­ity with my cam­era. The last thing you want is to be out in the field and have a key com­po­nent crap out on you. Some reports I read iden­ti­fied sim­ple prob­lems, such as the 3^rd party grip not inform­ing the cam­era about the bat­tery sta­tus. Life is too short for lit­tle annoy­ances or big ones. So I sucked up and bought Nikon’s exor­bi­tantly priced MB-​D12.

I plan on tak­ing the D800 out for its vir­gin shoot this week. Once I’ve lived with it for a while, I’ll report on any­thing new and worth­while. Until then, I’m happy with it so far.