A review by Andy Astbury

Let me say at the outset here, this is not an in-depth review of the D300, but it is a true reflection of my feelings about this new x1.5 crop factor body from Nikon.

I first got hold of this body towards the end of February 2008 and as of the date of writing this brief review – 25 April 2008 – the body has actually done over 13,500 exposures without missing a beat.

Now that’s not bad for me with a new camera – it usually takes a long time for me have faith in anything other than my trusty D2Xs, but I have to say that after only a couple of days the D300 became my standard working body.

By making this switch I have instantly gained 2 stops as this camera body produces images of the finest quality at 400 ISO – something the D2Xs could not do.

At 400 ISO the D300 produces very low luminance noise which is very fine grained and evenly spread across the entire image and across all 3 colour channels – incredibly easy to control with the Noise Ninja add-on for Bibble Pro – unlike the D2Xs where you begin to have heart palpitations if the need to move from 100 ISO arises.

But the D2Xs isn’t defunct by any means – the D300 needs to be set to L1.0 to replicate 100 ISO and to be honest the resultant images are rubbish !. So the D2Xs now languishes in my camera bag with a smug grin on its face knowing its position as the king of fine grain landscape and macro work is safe, and that it will never again have to be coupled to that nasty vicious piece of work that is my 300-800 lens!

Nope – the D300 is best left glued to 400 ISO, though its IQ at 800 and 1000 ISO is great too, but being a stock photographer who needs to up-size all his images I prefer to leave 400 ISO as my working number.

Now as it comes, out of the box, the D300 doesn’t produce tack-sharp images – but it only takes a few minutes to set the menu options up to give excellent results.

But before we go into that I will say one thing – Nikon got it a bit wrong with the AA filter – it’s a bit too strong, but there’s nothing you can do about it, and once the menus are set this fault is more than liveable with.

So the first thing to do is to turn the High ISO NR off – it’s too aggressive and as I mentioned before the noise is very easy to control in post production, so ‘in cam’ NR just isn’t necessary.

Secondly, open up the Picture Control, select Neutral and then go to the ‘in cam sharpening’ and select a value of 1.

Now if you select a value of 0 and turn all sharpening off – as you would on most any other body – the RAW files don’t process quite as cleanly as you would expect as ‘in cam sharpening’ usually has no effect on RAW files – but in the case of the D300 I think it does; and I’m not alone either, so select the value of 1 and then save.

Go to the AF menu and turn the AF lock-on value to ‘short’ or ‘off’, as ‘medium’ seems to be around 2 seconds and ‘long’ you measure in months!

Now we come to the Dynamic AF setup. The new Multicam3500DX system is very fast and on the whole very accurate, but out of the three available options I have found the 51-point option pretty useless with focal lengths of 500mm and above.

For the majority of my work I use the ‘single area’ AF mode and move the sensor selector around the VF to obtain a good composition.

But when it comes to tracking birds in flight you need to use either the 9 or 21 point Dynamic AF.

In the shot above of the Grey Heron I used the 9-point AF grouped around the left middle sensor and in continuous servo mode with AF lock-on set to ‘short’ – with big glass you do need to get your subject established in the viewfinder and allow the camera time to decide what it is supposed to be tracking.

I knew the Heron would fly in front of some trees so the AF lock-on was used to help prevent the camera throwing focus on to them.

Because I wanted the Heron fairly small in the frame the 9-point gave me a group size that barely covers the bird, so the reflections in the water don’t try and fool the AF into doing something stupid either.

Now in the shot of the Cormorant above I wanted the bird BIG in the frame – 21-point AF gives good subject coverage, and seeing as the bird is flying against a background of sky with no clouds the AF lock-on is turned OFF here to give faster and more accurate AF tracking.

But for images like the Canada portrait above single area AF is the way to go, using the multi-selector to pick a sensor that sits over the eye of the subject.

So now we’ve covered setting up the D300 to give low noise sharp images you are all set to think about taking it for a spin!

Take my advice and buy the battery grip, a D2Xs EN-EL4a battery and the required adaptor – this is what you need to extract the other great capability of the D300 – 8 FRAMES PER SECOND.

Shooting action at this speed is amazing and enables you to capture superb action sequences that would be impossible with the D2Xs or other bodies (save for the even faster D3).

Now when you start to use the D300 you might find under general conditions that it tends to over-expose a bit; I have mine setup with -0.3EV as a permanent feature, but sometimes when the light is a bit flat I do find I need to zero this.

There is another superb facility on the D300 called AF 'FINE TUNE', but don't jump into it without thought and research, I'll go into it in further depth soon, so watch this space...

So, to sum up, the D300 is not a flawless camera – though show me one that is!

It’s a fantastic machine that churns out usable images by the bucket load, is simply a dream to use and is constructed up to Nikons usual high and very robust pro-body standards.

I’m not going to sit here ‘banging on’ about the wonderful LCD and the cameras superb ergonomics as it’s all been said before – but what I will close by saying is this; if nature photography is your ‘thing’ then this is THE camera body to have – it does a job and does it extremely well.

And to be honest, if it were £700 more expensive it would still represent exceptional value for money – well done Nikon!

Is the D200 worth buying still – NOPE! Not at any price!

But it is not by any means a replacement for the D2Xs despite the reviews and articles you may read.

Andy