jfbacks
Well-known member
I've had three weekends with the 800mm6.3. It only took a little over a year to get one(non NPS). I've be shooing a 500f4VRII with a TC-14EIII pretty much permanently attached so for all intents an purposes a 700mm5.6. The field of view is pretty much indistinguishable. I would have been satisfied with my old setup indefinitely.....if it wasn't such a ball buster, as the image quality even with the TC is quite good. The 800 is definitely more hand holdable. The Cliff Swallow image was hand held. The Kentucky Warbler and Ovenbird were hand held at 1/250-320 second. My tripod is definitely going to see less action. The thing I'm really stoked about is being able to place the focus recall on the camera body. I just never liked having to move my left hand around to find the recall buttons on lens body or maybe I'm just to simple minded to press buttons with both hands at the same time. I was happy to find that firmware 4.0 added this option to the record button as I had never assigned any function to this button, it wasn't available on any 3.x. I set the recall to the minimum focusing distance and leave it there. The Z9 remembers this even if you turn the camera off as long as you don't remove the lens. Any close OOF bird is almost always locked on the way back out. Not letting go of the background when seeing a yellow blob of a warbler has gone from a major annoyance to more of a minor inconvinence. Two thumbs up for me. I have to admit I almost felt like I was dumping my wife for a younger woman(not that I would actually know) when I set my 500 in its case as a backup. It's been a constant companion for the last 6-7 years.
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