I am spending a couple of days with this:
thanks to the generosity of Kate McElwee.
For all my grousing about digital photography, a lot of my issues would go away if I had access to one of these. Why? It feels like a good SLR camera, not a digital or film camera — just a camera. The controls are easily worked out (I declined the tour of the controls as she was pretty busy when I picked up the little gem), the quality of the images and the experience of getting them is first-rate.
It offers the control you need for some images but can do all the heavy lifting as required. The main thing I noticed (and loved) was that it’s responsive: it writes pictures to disk as fast as you can take them, something my over-rated 5400 has never done well. And that’s taking RAW images, 14 Mb in size, not jpgs or tiffs.
Some other details:
- the rear screen is amazingly bright if you need to check something in the field
- the image counter counts down, not up: in other words, it knows how many images you have room for on the card and keeps track, rather than letting you run the card full so you have to delete images while the action is happening
- there are a lot of options and choices you can make, but you don’t have to — the program modes are pretty reliable
- it just feels solid and substantial without being bulky. It’s not heavy (an F4 weighs 3 pounds, more than twice what the D80 weighs. I took one of those on my honeymoon — 3 weeks — and I wasn’t sad to turn it back in to the rental shop.)
The reason I wanted it is that I will be helping wrangle some kindergarteners for the Dalai Lama’s visit and there’s a chance that some photography might break out, even if I don’t get into the session.
Not having used any other D-series cameras, I have no idea how much this offers vs the D50 or even the D70. But I have to wonder what more you get with a D300.
It appears the d200 and the d80 share a lot of bits, as the d3 and the d300 appear to. I’m 19,000 shots into my d70, and only starting to feel really comfortable with what I can do with it, and to occasionally feel its limits.
The biggest d70 weakness for me is its high-ISO performance, since I really prefer to shoot in natural light. I desperately crave a d300, which handles high ISOs well and looks like it might be the last great DX-format DSLR. Maybe by the time the full-frame d400 comes out, I’ll have figured out a way to justify that kind of bread.
Speaking of ISO, I joked the other day that someday we’ll hear the phrase, “Remember flash?” It will likely happen, no?
I like this camera website for reviews and comparisons:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/
A D300 review is being touted on the home page, at the moment.
Yeah, ISO is the main one. I regularly shoot indoors/at night at 2000, 2400, 3200 with the D300, whereas I’d be hard pressed to push the D80 much over 800. It’s not that the D300 doesn’t have noise, it’s just the patterns much more closely resemble what would be considered acceptable film grain.
The sensors are different too. The D80 has a CCD and the D300 the new xpeed CMOS, 14 bit a/d conversion. The LCDs are different too. The D300 has much more resolution than the D80.
The D80 is no slouch though, as I’m sure you’re discovering. My wife has one and it’s a fine camera. A big step up from where I started with the D’s with the D50.
Hmm, I think you’ll just see better/more refined artificial light. This D80’s onboard flash is pretty amazing in some of the stuff I have done with it.
What I am finding is that it makes it easier to take the pictures I want to take: it’s not that it’s doing the work, but it extends my reach. The AF is superfast, even with my old (ca. 1993) F-mount lenses, the exposure controls are excellent. It means thinking about the image more than about how to get it.
And the best news is she doesn’t need it back for another 10 days.