I went with Nikon D800 with the Anti-Aliasing Filter
I’ve had a lot of people asking which model I ordered; the regular D800 or the 800e where Nikon has removed the anti-aliasing filter (it’s supposed to create a little sharper images but without the filter you run the risk of certain photos having a moire pattern).
Well, I went with the model WITH the filter (the regular Nikon D800). I talked with a few friends that have shot the camera, and they suggested for the range of photos I take (from people, to sports, to fashion to travel), that I just stick with the regular D800 (which saved me a few hundred bucks to boot).
I’ve had to remove Moire from photos in Photoshop in the past and it is a BEAR!!!! Plus, from what I hear (and have seen at high-res) the D800 is so insanely sharp that I’m cool with leaving a few percent of sharpness on the table. After all, there is a program that adds sharpness in later, right? :)
One last thing:
I’ve had people asking:
(a) If Lightroom coming out with a Moiré removal brush is a coincidence or not? I haven’t confirmed this with anybody at Adobe or Nikon, but my guess it that’s a total coincidence (since that feature wasn’t just added to Lightroom 4 last week—-these things take a LONG time to develop, no pun intended). And…
(b) The bad thing is, all the methods for Moire removal that I’ve seen over the years all involve the slight or moderate blurring of the affected area, and I’ve yet to see any of them that do a really brilliant job of it, (including the new one in Lightroom 4, which is actually pretty decent). They reduce it to some extent, but they don’t fully remove it. The last case of Moire I had was so bad I asked our own Pete Collins to help me out, and it took him literally hours to remove it, and it included a lot of Photoshop magic, cloning, copying, and sweat.
So, in short, in the race between a few percent of extra sharpness and fear of moiré; fear won! ;-)