Impressions of the d300

Yes I bit the bullet and bought a d300. It was $1995 on ebay, how could I resist that? my main reason was I have been dabbling more in portraiture these days and I have to manually focus everything, which is a pain. I wanted a camera that could focus better.

Though I have only had the camera a few days and not had much time to play with it, I have taken a couple of test shots with it that I will upload.

My first few pictures were taken to see if the high iso is as good as people have been saying.

Below is the same image taken at f1.8 with the nikkor 50mm at night under tungsten light. Note the differences in colour, they were all taken with the camera's auto everything, however I manually adjusted iso and shutter speed. I've cropped the original as they would of been too large, click on the images to see a larger version.

iso 3200, f1.8 1/10


iso1600 f1.8 1/5


iso 640, f1.8, 1/5


iso200, f1.8, 1.6 secs


Note there is slight noise visible at iso200, though the shutter speed was 1.6 seconds.

To compare a daylight shot, I took this today.



This is straight from camera, the only thing I did in photoshop was change it to srgb, reduce the size and convert to a jpg. Note the nice colours (however a polarize IS on). Images in my d70 were always a little washed out (see tip 11: landscape retouching) even though I had it set to the most saturated colours in camera as possible. Sharpness is excellent also, my d70 always required a fair amount of sharpening (even though I had it set to camera to enchanced). Though im not sure if this is merely sharpness of the difference between 6mp and 12.

Here is the above image with a selection of it cropped, from the full size image


I am not sure if its visible in the above image, but there is slight digital noise even at iso 200.

Conclusion
I wanted to take a few more shots before I made a blog post about this camera however I did so anyway, perhaps I will update this post later if my opinions change but my initial impression is as follows:

The d300 is what the d70 should of been 3 years ago. Perhaps in another 3 years $2000 cameras will be sharper, have less noise and full frame. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give this camera an 8. It is very good but not amazing. I loathe digital noise with a passion, and would of liked to have seen none at least at iso 100-400. 3200 iso is pointless, unless you really NEED to take a shot in near dark, without flash. To spy on your neighbour, for example. Who is sleeping with the president.1600 is ok..much better then the d70, which was pretty much unusable above 200. The d300 this can be stretched to about iso800 for best results.

This camera makes me wonder what the canon 5d11's iso 25600 will look like. I mean there is no point bragging about high isos if well, things still look like shit.

Just my two cents. lol. If you are looking for an upgrade from a "prosumer" dslr then this is the camera for you. Other people I would recommend waiting for a full frame camera, as the canon 5d mark 2 is rumoured to have a starting price of $3500 (USD) as opposed to the d3's (current) $5000 AUD, and is meant to be available mid 2008. Though if you are an avid nikon user with nikon lenses you would like to retain, then this is the camera for you, unless you wish to wait for the d3 to lower in price. Perhaps when the canon 5d mark 2 is released the d3 will become more affordable for consumers.

update: a week later. The high iso is better then I initially mentioned, I went to a pub and the images it took at isos 640 were very good, even iso 3200 was usable, though I wouldn't upload it or print it out this high.

Other dislikes however are: on/off button feels soft and flimsy, holding the camera one handed to take self portraits, its easy to turn the button off. My d70's buttons were quite stiff, even the arrow key pad was harder to move then the plastic feeling d300's. The d70's remote (ML 3) is not compatible with the d300 as it has no infra red. You must use the relatively expensive nikons MC 36 . There is a cheaper ebay option the Phottix wireless remote, however both require you to plug a cord into the camera, which annoys me. Live view while novel at first, doesn't quite feel right, and pressing the shutter to focus turns the screen off.

So still a few annoyances with the camera. However it still has an excellent focus system (and even has focus tracking) as well as a very good representation of colours. In bracketing mode it takes pictures incredibly fast.