Gene51 wrote:
The D850 will feel completely familiar to your D500. And yes, despite naysayers, an FX camera is an improvement over a DX - better detail capture, better low light performance, more cropping options, the ability to get the most out of the best optics, etc.
About 7 years ago I had a D300S as my main camera, with a D200 as a backup. I bought a D700 - even though it was 12 mp like the D300, the images were several orders of magnitude better for most of the reasons stated above - cropping was still somewhat limited. I liked the difference an FX camera brought to my images, so I ditched all of my DX stuff, and bought a used D3S - which, even by today's standards, has outstanding low light/high ISO performance.
I went on to get a D800 and a D810 - and discovered the concept of downsampling an image to 12 mp in order to tame the noise. My D810 has a noise characteristic of the D3S when I downsample the 36 mp image to 12 mp. With a D850's 45 mp, you can downsample even more, and crop to your heart's delight. One thing I did notice when I went from 12 mp to 36 mp - lenses that were ok with 12 mp all of a sudden turned to junk on 36 mp. I had borrowed a 28-300 from Nikon when I owned the D700 and while I was not particularly thrilled with it, I thought I could use it from time to time. I held off knowing I would soon be getting a D800 and I was sure glad I did - the lens was mostly awful on a 36 mp body - so I saved myself a few $$$ by waiting. The moral to the story is - be prepared to spend some $$$ if you want to get the most out of a high mp body. Otherwise stay below 24 mp and you'll have a few more lens options.
The D850 will feel completely familiar to your D50... (
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My thoughts and Nikon camera body ownership closely parallels Gene's. My main Nikon bodies are a D850 and D500 with lenses from 20mm to 500mm. Since most of may shooting is nature oriented, I see no benefit for me in purchasing right now any of the Nikon mirrorless bodies.