I have and love the Nikon 200-500. It has worked quite well for me.

BUT, that's because I don't treat it like it is weather sealed, when it obviously isn't.

I'm not sure why you're asking the question as you clearly know it's doesn't have the kind of sealing you need.

The Sigma 150-600 Sport or possibly the Tamron 150-600 G2 are your obvious options in this class of lens.

Nice photo! I've never used a Lensbaby lens. How would it be different than using a center spot filter like this tiffen, or just a blurred vignette in post (which is something I do regularly)?

I might suggest reading the whole thread before responding. In this case, I think it would have been illuminating.

Next, you may want to have your own eyes checked.

I've gotta say, this is very strange. So it's only happened once, right? Did you by chance try removing the battery?

Sometimes electronics gets pushed into a funny state -- perhaps from a cosmic ray strike -- that is very difficult to recover from while powered up. Maybe it cleared itself in this case by being off long enough to drain off excess charge, or maybe it just had to cool down.

It is interesting that in the blown-out highlights, the black lines aren't black, but light gray. That suggests to me that the vertical bars may be due to a gain reduction going into the ADC or perhaps a subset of bits lost on an internal bus, but without knowing something about the internal circuitry design it's pretty hard to do anything but guess at it's cause.

If it was something like a cosmic ray strike upset, then it was just a very unlucky coincidence and would likely never happen again. There would be nothing for Nikon to fix and you'd be wasting your time and money sending it back to them. Even if it is something else that caused it, Nikon probably wouldn't be able to fix it if they couldn't reproduce the problem themselves. If it were me, I'd wait to see if it happened again to make a stronger case and to gather a bit more information that could suggest a cause.

I'm curious what you think of it. Personally I don't care for the tilt nor the balance, but I know there are other here that do like tilted portraits. Again, just my taste, but if you rotate the image so that the angle halfway between the tilt of your faces is vertical which then necessarily crops in on the faces, yields a composition I like much better.

For the sake of interested readers, I think you typo'ed 15mm.

and the EXIF says f/6.3 . Just imagine how long those spikes would have been if it had been f/16 or f/22 as they aren't bad at all at f/6.3 .

FYI, when I posted about RawTherapee, I had also tried and failed with Darktable, but I only had version 2.4 at the time and it predated the XT3. Since then, I got to my regular computer to try version 2.6 and it handled the XT3 RAF file quite well. Both RawTherapee and Darktable are free and available for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Unix OSs.

I'm don't use Fuji but was curious by your question so I downloaded an XT-3 .RAF file from the DPReview sample gallery and tried it in RawTherapee. It seemed to handle the file quite competently.

The Z cameras have 90%, even PDAF on-sensor coverage and the D850 is probably closer to 20% gappy, off-sensor and 0% on-sensor PDAF coverage. I'm not thinking the Z firmware is going to port over very well.

For what it's worth, the Nikon dSLR 3D tracking is better than the Z's tracking.

Each has their strengths.

It sounds like some here have been watching too many hollywood movies.

The way jPEG is encoded, it makes getting lower resolution information fairly easy so some viewers show that first, then it dives into to the more computationally intense descrete inverse fourier transforms and other decoding to pull out the details. Nothing all that interesting, it's just giving you something rough to look at while it's fully decoding.

Thanks for checking it. So definitely on the internal zoom list.

Yeah, clever move by Canon for the R.

Can you double check that? I see references to "camming" when zooming and can't find any claim other than yours of internal zooming.

Yeah, I know about the 80-200/2.8 (I have one), but don't consider that current.

It might be interesting to make a list of internal zoom lenses. As a strawman, off the top of my head, current dSLR internal zoom lenses are:

Canon:
* 16-35/2.8
* 16-36/4
* 70-200/2.8
* 200-400/4 ??
Nikon:
* 16-35/4G
* 70-200/2.8E (I think the G VRII is discontinued)
* 70-200/4G
* 180-400/4E
* 200-400/4G
Sigma:
* 18-35/1.8
* 50-100/1.8
* 70-200/2.8
* 150-300/2.8
* 200-500/2.8
* 300-800/5.6
Tamron:
* 70-200/2.8

Corrections?

It's hard to make internal-zoom lenses. The 70-200mm or longer seem to be practical (but generally more expensive) if the zoom range isn't too big, but I don't think it's practical for wide (say 14-24mm -ish) or normal (24-70mm -ish) or for any wide zoom ranges.

I would expect the same for Z-mount as F-mount -- the 70-200/2.8 S will probably be an internal zoom, but the others zooms on the roadmap probably won't be. I don't think the mount choice makes much, if any, difference.