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.