Nikon D300S Review

Nikon D300S Design

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Front View. The only change here compared to the D300 is the addition of a microphone grill just below the D300S logo.

Left View. The door on the left now also covers an external stereo microphone jack, and the HDMI connector has changed from the larger Type-A jack to a smaller Type-C jack. The previous composite video out port is now an A/V out port, to support monaural audio playback for movies on analog TVs.

Right View. The sliding card access door now provides access to dual CompactFlash Type I and SD card slots. CompactFlash Type II and Microdrives are not supported.

Top View. Nothing new here, except the release mode dial on the left has a new Quiet Shutter-release setting, and its previous Live View setting has been moved to a dedicated button on the back.

Back View. Most of the changes are here on the back, including the addition of dedicated Live View and Info buttons, a new button in the center of the multi-selector disk, and a speaker grill. The card door latch has been eliminated, in favor of a sliding door design. Here, you can see the protective plastic LCD cover snapped in place.

Bottom View. Nothing new here. The D300S uses the same EN-EL3e battery pack as the D300, and is compatible with the same MB-D10 battery grip.

Nikon D300S Operation

With its many buttons, knobs, and dials, the Nikon D300S could look intimidating to the unseasoned SLR user. But to the experienced shooter, the Nikon D300S’s controls will quickly make this camera a photographer’s best friend. All key buttons for essential controls are on the Nikon D300S’s surface skin, and several of the buttons can be reprogrammed to meet your needs or personal shooting style. Probably the most valuable control cluster on the D300S is on the top deck, left of the pentaprism housing: the 3-button control for selecting White Balance, Quality and ISO.

Many functions can be changed using a button and the Main Command dial while looking at the Status LCD on the top deck. Other items are changed by pressing the Menu key and using the navigation disk on the back of the D300S.

Nikon D300S Top Panel Status LCD

As with most higher-end Nikon DSLRs, the top-panel data readout LCD communicates a lot of information about current camera settings, and is used in conjunction with the various buttons and Command Dials to set many camera functions. You can also use the main LCD to adjust many of the same settings, but using the top LCD saves power and can be more convenient when the camera is below eye level. It’s also always active whenever the camera is on and not in sleep mode, so you don’t have to go into the menu system to make changes to the settings it supports. The panel is illuminated by a green backlight which is activated by a third, spring-loaded lamp position on the power switch. The illustrations below show the meaning of the various icons and readouts in this display.

Nikon D300S Shooting Info Display

Like other recent Nikon DSLRs, the D300S has the ability to display shooting info and settings on the main LCD. The main LCD is larger and in color, so some prefer to use it over the top LCD, at the expense of reduced battery life. It’s nice that Nikon gives you the choice of display type with the D300S. The rear LCD’s greater display area allows more information to be displayed, although it’s important to note that not all data elements from the top-panel readout are replicated here. Because it’s a full pixel-based display, it can also show greater detail, such as the sub-AF points surrounding the main one in Dynamic-Area AF mode.

Nikon D300S Rear-Panel Shooting Info Display
The rear-panel info display on the Nikon D300S is quite similar to what we’ve seen on other recent Nikon SLRs, conveys a lot of information.	When shooting under dim lighting, you can opt for a light-on-dark version of the screen that doesn’t glare so brightly at night. An Auto mode selects the version for you, based on ambient light measured via the camera’s metering system.
The icon bar along the bottom provides quick access to a host of items otherwise buried in the menu system.	The Nikon D300S gives you a lot of choices for what function to assign to the front-panel Func button, plus several options for its use with the command dials as well.

The illustrations below show the meaning of the various icons and readouts available on the Shooting Display screen:

Nikon D300S Virtual Horizon

A really neat feature of the D300S first seen on the D3 is the virtual horizon gauge, activated from the Setup menu. The display remains active as long as certain buttons aren’t pressed (such as the shutter release). Sensors in the body are used to detect the orientation of the camera and a virtual horizon is displayed in realtime, similar to an aircraft instrument, though it only shows left/right tilt (or “roll”). This is useful for critical alignment of subjects such as buildings, the horizon, etc. The virtual horizon display works in both landscape and portrait orientations. Unlike the D3 (and D700), the electronic analog scale in the viewfinder and top panel LCD cannot be made to display the amount of tilt. The virtual horizon is also available during Live View mode as one of the overlay options via the “Info” button. In Live View mode, the display is smaller and mostly translucent, so as not to obscure the preview.

Nikon D300S Playback mode

Playback mode is entered by pressing the playback button. The D300S’s playback mode provides a great deal of information about your pictures after you’ve shot them. A variety of up to nine different playback displays can be cycled through using the up/down arrows on the multi-selector, including image with file information and and focus point display, with highlight warning, with RGB / luminance histograms and white balance information, three screens with overlaid shooting and image parameter information (an additional GPS info screen is available when a GPS device was used when the image was captured), and an overview display with basic shooting data and luminance histogram. The screenshot animation at right shows the sequence when the down arrow is used.

As you’d expect, the Nikon D300S offers a comprehensive RGB histogram display mode. Histogram displays are common on professional digital cameras (and many amateur models now), regarded as almost mandatory by many pros for evaluating exposure levels. A histogram is simply a graph of how many pixels there are in the image at each brightness level. The brightness is the horizontal axis, running from black at the left to white at the right. The height of the graph shows the relative number of pixels having each brightness level. This sort of display is very handy for determining under- or overexposure. Ideally, the histogram would stretch across the entire width of the display, using the full range of brightness values available. An underexposed image will have a histogram with all the data lumped on the left-hand side, with nothing reaching all the way to the right. Likewise, an overexposed image will have all the data lumped on the right hand side. Clipped highlights are shown by blinking any highlights that are saturated in any of the color channels. It does this by taking the nearly-white areas on the LCD and toggling them between white and black.

As with the Highlights display mode, the blinking highlights in the histogram display mode can also be displayed separately for each color channel by selecting R, G, or B in the RGB Histogram display mode. The screenshots at right show an example of where this might be useful: The bright, strongly colored lamp shade (deliberately shot with an incorrect white balance, to produce the strong hue) showed only minor lost detail in the screenshot above, looking at the RGB or luminance highlights, but the shot at right shows that the red channel is badly blown. This is quite common: It’s easy to lose detail in a strongly-colored object well before other, more neutral-colored highlights are lost.

Finally, the shot at right shows a nice feature that is we’re surprised isn’t more common: You can zoom into the image and pan around the magnified display, and the RGB histogram will change to show only the portion of the image that you’re looking at. In this mode, you lose the blinking highlights, but this strikes us as very useful for checking critical parts of the image, to see if you’ve held highlight or shadow detail in areas you really care about.

Of course the D300S also lets you zoom out to quickly find and select images, or magnify them for closer inspection on its gorgeous 3-inch, 922K pixel LCD. You have the normal 4-, 9- or 72-image thumbnail displays available by pressing the thumbnail/zoom out button (unlike the D90 however, no calendar view is offered), and you can magnify them up to approximately 27x for large, 20x for medium or 13x for small images, using the zoom in button. Once magnified, you can scroll around the image using the multi-selector to examine critical detail and framing. When you zoom in or out on an image, a little navigation window pops up in the lower right corner of the display, showing a thumbnail of the image, with a yellow box indicating the currently-viewed area. Portrait-mode images can also be automatically rotated to match the camera’s current orientation, using the Rotate Tall option in the Playback menu. Of course, there are the usual options to protect or delete images or movies in Playback mode, as well. Since the D300S offers dual memory card slots, the playback mode also allows the user to select only one card for review; it’s also possible to limit review to only data from a specific folder, or only data captured using the D300S (but not other cameras).

Using Custom Function f2, you can also program the multi-selector center button to automatically zoom in on the active focus point, to a preselected initial zoom setting (low, medium or high; high is shown at right), to make focus verification faster and more convenient. We liked this function a lot, for quickly checking focus on the most critical part of an image. (Great for portrait shots: Put an AF point on the subject’s eye, then check quickly after the shot to make sure the eyelashes are sharp.) Another handy feature for portraits is face detection in playback. Pressing the magnify button enables face detection, and if the camera detects faces, it will briefly highlight them with a white box in the navigation window, and you can quickly scroll through all detected faces at the current magnification using the front command dial.

Movies can be played by pressing the multi-selector’s center button, and during movie playback both the down arrow and OK button serve as a pause / resume control. The left and right arrows allow cuing during playback, with subsequent presses adjusting the speed to 2, 4, 8 or 16x. While paused, these same buttons allow cuing through the video one frame at a time. Before movie playback is started, the OK button can be used to call up an edit screen, where the start and end points of the movie can be specified for trimming, with the same controls as during regular playback, and the result saved as a new file. Movies shorter than two seconds in length cannot be edited in-camera.

To return the D300S to shooting mode, simply press the playback button again, or half-press the shutter button.

Nikon D300S Optics

Lenses

Like other Nikon SLRs, the D300S accommodates a wide range of Nikkor lenses, via the standard Nikon “F” lens mount. Unlike the Nikon D3000 and D5000 consumer models, however (as well as the D40, D40X and D60 before them), the D300S’s lens mount includes both a mechanical AF coupling for older “screw-drive” autofocus lenses, as well as AF electrical contacts for the latest AF-IF or AF-S Nikkor lenses with internal focus motors.

The Nikon D300S’s lens mount also includes an AI aperture ring connector, a little metal vane located just outside the lens mount flange (at about 1 o’clock), that interfaces with old AI Nikkor manual focus lenses. This engages with the aperture ring on AI-style Nikkor lenses, and lets the D300S support aperture-priority metering mode and provide manual-exposure metering with them. Lower models including the D90 do not have this feature, so the D300S is compatible with a wider range of older Nikkor lenses than its lesser siblings.

With very few exceptions, you can use the Nikon D300S with any F Mount Nikkor lens ever made. See the table and notes below for detailed lens compatibility information extracted from the D300S User’s Manual (courtesy of Nikon USA):

Nikon D300S AF Assist

The Nikon D300S has a bright, dedicated autofocus-assist lamp, which also doubles as a self-timer lamp. We prefer this setup over using the flash strobe for AFÂ assist, as this totally decouples autofocusing from flash operation. (The flash does not need to be raised or active.)Â The AF assist lamp illuminates automatically in poor lighting conditions, and can be disabled via a Custom menu setting.

Nikon D300S Autofocus System

The Nikon D300S uses the same Multi-CAM 3500DX autofocus sensor as its predecessor the D300, and focus options are essentially unchanged between the two cameras. The Nikon D300S has a total of 51 autofocus regions, of which 45 are arranged in a rectangular array of five points in height and nine points across, while three each of the remaining six points are positioned to the right and left of the central array.

Of the 51 total AF points, 15 (three central columns of 5 points each) are cross-type sensors that are sensitive to detail in both axes, while the remaining 36 points are linear, sensitive to detail in the vertical axis only. Each of the 51 focus areas is individually selectable, allowing precise control over the area of the frame from which focus should be determined. Alternatively, an Auto-area AF mode measures all 51 focus areas, automatically determines which of them are on the primary subject, and then activates only those areas. Nikon says that AF speed has been increased on the Nikon D300S relative to the earlier D300, and we did find some improvement in shutter lag in auto-area mode; other lag times were essentially identical, though.

Like past Nikon DSLRs with built-in flashes, the D300S’s AF-assist light is a bright incandescent bulb that emits from the body near the handgrip. We thought to call particular attention to it, because some DSLRs use the flash as an AF-assist light. This would be fine, but they can then also require that the flash be used in the exposure, so there’s no way to have AF assist for available-light shots. The D300S doesn’t have this limitation.

The D300S lets you choose either auto or manual focus via a small dial on the front of the camera, next to the lens. Setting the switch to “M” puts the camera into Manual focus mode, “S” places it in Single-servo autofocus mode, and “C” places it in Continuous-servo AF. Single-servo AF simply means that the camera sets focus only once, when the Shutter button is first pressed halfway, and is best for stationary objects. Continuous-servo AF means that the camera continuously adjusts the focus, as long as the Shutter button is halfway pressed, and is best for moving objects.

There’s an important difference between Single and Continuous Servo modes, although Custom Functions a1 and a2 allow the behavior to be changed. By default, the shutter won’t release in Single-servo mode unless the lens is focused, or the lens itself is set to manual focus. (Focus Priority) In Continuous-servo mode however, the camera defaults to firing regardless of the state of focus. (Release Priority) Through the Custom Functions, the Single-servo mode can also offer release priority, while the Continuous-servo mode offers an additional choice which Nikon calls “Release + Focus” priority. This ordinarily defaults to release priority behavior, but automatically switches to focus-priority and slows the camera’s frame rate as it deems necessary in low-light or low-contrast conditions where focusing is more difficult.

AF Area Modes
An AF Area Mode lever on the camera’s rear panel lets you select between Single-point AF, Dynamic-area AF, and Auto-area AF modes. Single Area AF simply means that the camera judges focus based on one part of the subject, and the user can manually select the AF point by pressing the arrow keys. The other two modes are rather more complex, offering the ability to automatically track moving subjects, determine scene types and even recognize the location of human subjects in a scene.

In Auto-area AF mode, the camera chooses which AF points to use automatically, with the selected points shown briefly in the viewfinder for reference when in Single-servo AF mode. The camera automatically determines the subject type, and bases AF point selection on its decision of the main subject in the scene. When using either G- or D-type lenses, this becomes rather more intelligent, with the camera able to use its 1,005 pixel exposure/white balance sensor to distinguish human subjects from the background. This allows the D300S to automatically select the focus points located over your human subject(s)

Dynamic-area AF
Dynamic Area AF is relevant only when in Continuous-servo AF mode, with its behavior mirroring that of Single-point AF when in Single-servo mode. Dynamic Area AF employs all or a subset of the autofocus points, though you can still manually select the starting point for AF operation. When Dynamic Area focusing is enabled, the camera first focuses on the subject in the primary focus area. When the subject moves to a different AF area, the camera shifts the focus to “follow” the subject. This is great for irregularly moving subjects. (Sports and kids come to mind.) As well as allowing tracking across all 51 AF points, at the user’s option the camera can limit subject tracking to only a small area of 9 or 21 points including the user-selected starting point. The illustrations above show the three different Dynamic-area options, with the point arrays grouped around the central AF point. As noted, you can manually select different starting points, and the cluster of Dynamic-area points will follow your selection. As an aid to users transitioning from the earlier D200’s system or using the D200 with newer bodies simultaneously, there’s also also an option that lets you choose a single active point from a selection of 11, matching the AF point layout of the D200.

Dynamic-area 3D Tracking Mode with RGB-Assist

The final point selection option in Dynamic Area AF is the 3D Tracking mode, which allows the camera to use the 1,005-element RGB exposure/white balance sensor to aid in subject tracking. This sensor has been used in Nikon bodies for a long time now, used by their excellent 3D Matrix Metering system. In matrix metering, patterns of tone and color are used as an index into a large database of “reference scenes” stored in the camera’s memory. The camera doesn’t directly understand it’s snapping a portrait shot, but when it sees a human-shaped blob against a different color background, its scene indexing tells it that it should try to get the exposure of the blob correct, even if it means the overall scene brightness would come out low.

Starting with the D3 and the original D300, the Nikon engineers have used the data from the 1,005 pixel RGB exposure sensor to help guide the camera’s autofocus decisions. While the RGB sensor provides no distance information, it has much more resolution than even the large array of AF points on the Multi-CAM3500 AF sensor. As was the case in the D3/D300, the D300S’s AE system also incorporates a Diffractive Optical Element (DOE) designed to improve the effective resolution of the RGB sensor by optically aligning the red, green, and blue pixel planes with each other. The 1,005 element AE sensor also captures both tone and color information, making it easier to discern where objects are in the field of view and how they’re moving.

With this RGB-assisted AF approach, when an AF point initially acquires a lock on a particular subject, the camera immediately notes the pattern of light and color found at the corresponding point on the RGB array. Then, as the subject or camera moves, the camera can track the light/color pattern corresponding to the subject across the face of the RGB array. This provides much finer-grained position information than could ever be obtained from the sparse AF array. The RGB sensor doesn’t provide any distance information, but by more precisely tracking subject information, it permits a much surer hand-off of the subject between AF points.

The use of the RGB sensor as part of its AF tracking is unusual enough to warrant a little additional discussion. Back when the D3 and original D300 were announced, we had an opportunity to query the chief engineer responsible for the new AF system fairly closely, in the course of which we learned some important details of how the system worked. The following is taken from our review of the D3, but all the information is directly applicable to the Nikon D300S, as the same AF technology is used in that model as well.

In our discussions with Nikon staff, we learned that the RGB sensor contributes some tracking information even when the subject has moved outside the area covered by the AF sensors. At first this didn’t seem to make sense: What good would it do to know where the subject is, if there aren’t any AF sensors there to tell the camera how far away it is, or how fast it’s going? While there are a number of ways the AE sensor could help the AF system outside the active AF area; in my discussions with Nikon engineers, though, I learned that the primary purpose for out-of-area tracking is to reduce the time required by the AF system to re-acquire a subject.

As the diagram above shows, the 1,005 element RGB sensor covers a somewhat greater portion of the frame than do the 51 active AF points. (When I asked the engineers just what portion of the frame area the RGB AE sensor covered, however, they politely but firmly declined to say with any specificity.) The wandering red line drawn on the figure shows the path followed by a hypothetical subject during a continuous-shooting burst. Note that a portion of the subject’s path (the part between the two blue “X” marks) is outside the active AF area, yet still within the area covered by the 1,005 pixel sensor. In previous Nikon AF systems (and those of competing manufacturers), the AF system would have no idea where the subject was once it passed beyond the active AF area. As a result, it would take more time to re-acquire the subject when it re-entered the active AF area near the bottom of the frame. In the Nikon D3 and D300, though, the AF system remains aware of the position of the subject, even if it doesn’t know its range while it’s outside the AF area. When it re-enters the AF area, the camera can quickly determine its range, and doesn’t need to spend any processing cycles figuring out which AF point is covering it.

This edge-of-frame tracking ability isn’t a panacea though. While the engineers declined to say just how much of the frame the RGB sensor covered (and I did press them on this point), it seems that it doesn’t extend too far beyond the edges of the AF array. In our discussions, they were clear that the D3/D300 could only track objects a small distance outside the AF area. They seemed much more emphatic about the impact of improved tracking accuracy within the active AF area than outside it. Still, the ability to reduce re-acquisition time, even in a limited percentage of cases, is a very worthwhile feature. In the case of the D300S, the Matrix metering sensor is likely to cover almost the entire frame, so the D300S has a slight advantage over Nikon’s full-frame cameras using this system.

It’s easy to imagine how this capability could help in the tracking of difficult subjects: While I’m sure it’s less of a problem for pro shooters, I myself have often encountered situations in sports or wildlife shooting where it was a challenge to keep a rapidly- or erratically-moving subject framed within the AF area. If the camera were able to track such subjects when they wandered slightly outside the AF area, I’d expect I’d have had more “keepers” when I came back from the shooting sessions. It’s no kind of a scientific test, but in shooting with the D3 and D300 and now the new D300S and D3s, I have indeed been very pleased by how few shots were lost due to blown focus. I’m personally a little leery of camera AF systems in general, but have had consistently good results with this advanced system from Nikon.

One question of course, is why Nikon waited until now to develop such an AF system. After all, the 1,005 element RGB sensor had been in use in Nikon SLRs for over 10 years before Nikon linked it to the AF system in the D3/D300. When I asked the engineers about this, they said that a key factor was the speed of the CPU used for camera management; the chip that handles autofocus, autoexposure, and user interface operation, as opposed to image processing. The control processor used in the D3 and D300 was considerably faster than similar processors in earlier models, and so had sufficient throughput to do meaningful image processing with the 1,005 element sensor data in real-time, where earlier units did not. Secondarily, the newly-added Diffractive Optical Element brought greater imaging precision to the 1,005-element sensor, permitting more accurate discrimination and localization of objects within the AE area.

These days, most improvements in camera functionality are incremental, basically taking what had been done before, only now doing it a bit faster, a little more precisely, etc. In contrast, Nikon’s use of RGB exposure sensor data to assist AF operation stands out as a more radical innovation, bringing an entirely new approach to the problem of AF tracking, different from any we’ve seen before. It’s an exciting development, and a very clever idea, but we won’t know how successful it is until we hear the experience of practicing photographers using the new system in the field.

Changing AF Points & Locking Focus
In any of the AF modes, you can change the primary focus area by unlocking the focus area selector (the Four-Way Arrow pad on the back panel) and then shifting the focus area using the up, down, right, or left arrow directions on the control rocker. You can lock the focus area selection by turning the switch back to the lock position. By default, the Nikon D300S does not “wrap” the focus area selector as you scroll between focus areas. Custom Setting a7 lets you opt for a “Wrap” function. What this means is that if you press the right arrow key again, after the right focus area is already selected, the selection will immediately jump to the left focus area. The same thing happens when moving the focus area selection vertically as well.

There are several methods by which you can lock focus on the D300S. The first is to half-press the Shutter button to lock the focus, placing your subject in the selected focus area, halfway pressing the Shutter button, then realigning the composition and firing the shutter. Alternatively, when using Single Servo AF, you can press the AF-L/AE-L button (or through Custom Function F5, the Function button) to lock focus, even if the Shutter button is released. This lets you recompose the photograph without keeping your finger on the Shutter button, but on the AE-L/AF-L button instead. (Reducing the chance that you’ll accidentally trip the shutter when you don’t intend to.) Finally, the AF-ON button acts in the same manner as half-pressing the shutter button (but without engaging Vibration Reduction if a compatible lens is attached, and without determining exposure, which the shutter button can do if Custom Function c1 is set to “On”).

There are several options available for the AE-L/AF-L button, which can be set via Custom Settings Menu f4. You can program it to lock either focus or exposure separately, or both together (the default). You can also change its operation so a single press locks and holds the exposure setting. A second press or — optionally — a shutter release will then reset the focus / exposure locks, as will the camera’s metering system powering down. You can also disable the AE-L/AF-L button altogether, have it mirror the AF-ON button, or set it to preview depth of field, lock flash exposure, disable flash, trigger a burst of bracketed photos with one shutter button press, select the metering mode, jump to playback mode or the top of the My Menu, or change the file type. While pressed and in concert with rotating the command dials, the AE-L / AF-L button can control the dynamic AF area, auto bracketing or non-CPU lens number, or be disabled. The Function button can mirror all of these behaviors too, with the exception of serving as a secondary AF-ON button, and with an added ability to change to a 1EV step size when controlling aperture or shutter speed with the command dials and pressing the Function button. (Phew — that’s a lot of customization!)

Nikon D300S AF “Fine Tuning”

The microscopic pixel dimensions of modern digital sensors have placed more extreme demands on autofocus accuracy than was ever the case in the film era. This has revealed a lot of shortcomings in autofocus systems, not the least of which have been the frequent “near-miss” mismatches between particular lens/camera combinations. A lens that focuses fine on one body may front-focus on another and back-focus on a third. Change bodies and the problem may move to another lens.

Solving this sort of mismatch problem has often meant shipping your entire complement of lenses and bodies to the manufacturer to have them all fine-tuned to match each other. This was and is a costly and time-consuming process, and if any of the lenses in question were made by someone other than the camera manufacturer, you were simply out of luck: If you returned them to the lens maker, chances are you’d hear back that they were in perfect working order. (And well they might be: Attached to a different body, they might focus just fine.)

Ideally, there’d be a way to tell the camera to tweak its focus forward or back just a tad, depending on the lens you were using. In fact, this is just what the Nikon D300S provides: You can register up to 12 different lens “types” with the camera (more on “types” in a moment), and make micro-adjustments to the AF system for each, across a range of +/-20 (arbitrary) increments.

What does lens “type” mean here? Basically, a lens “type” is a lens model. For instance, if you have a 70-200mm f/2.8 and a 100mm f/2.8 Micro, the camera would recognize each lens when it was attached to the camera, and automatically load the appropriate fine-tuning setting. If you had two 70-200mm f/2.8s, though, the camera would have no way to distinguish between them, and would load the same fine-tuning settings for either one.

While there may be some photgraphers (particularly pros) who have more than 12 lenses in their kits, the 12-lens “fine-tuning library” will cover the needs of the vast majority of D300S users. We’ve found that this system also recognize lens types for third-party lenses as well, so its utility extends to essentially any CPU-containing AF lens the Nikon D300S can work with.

The lens-based AF tuning function can also be disabled altogether, if you want to revert to the standard focus tuning for all lenses. It should be noted that AF fine tuning only affects phase detection autofocusing, having no effect over contrast detection AF in Live View mode. (It’s also an option best left disabled unless you know you have a front- or back-focusing issue with one or more of your lenses, because the system can also be used to manually introduce a focusing error, perhaps making it impossible to focus to infinity, or the the ordinary macro focusing distance of a lens.)

AF fine-tuning has by now become a fairly standard feature on higher-end SLRs. That doesn’t diminish the fact that it’s a huge step forward in focus accuracy, though, giving photographers the tools they need to maintain and calibrate their own equipment.

Nikon D300S Anti-Dust Technology

To help combat dust particles that can enter the camera when changing lenses, the Nikon D300S includes an ultrasonic dust cleaning system to automatically vibrate the low-pass filter over the sensor each time the camera is turned on or off (programmable). There is also an immediate mode where cleaning takes place on demand, and of course, there’s a manual cleaning mode, where the camera lifts the mirror and opens the shutter, allowing access to the low pass filter with a blower or other cleaning device. You can also capture an “Image Dust Off Reference Photo,” and use the optional Capture NX2 software to remove dust shadows from your images via post-processing.

While ultrasonic dust removal systems can increase the interval between manual cleanings, it bears noting that no such system system can completely eliminate the need to occasionally clean the sensor manually. Copper Hill Images is an advertiser of ours, but we’d recommend their wet/dry cleaning system even if they weren’t (it’s what we use in our own lab): See the Copper Hill website for details.

Lens Test Results – Automatic CA Correction

The D300S usually ships without a standard “kit” lens, so this section would normally be left blank intentionally. We felt that Nikon’s in-camera chromatic aberration correction deserved some special notice, though. See the text below…

Nikon In-Camera CA Correction
200% Crop from Nikon D90, 18-105mm lens at 18mm Converted from RAW, no CA correction applied	200% Crop from Nikon D90, 18-105mm lens at 18mm Camera JPEG, Automatic CA correction applied

Like most of their recent higher-end SLR models, the Nikon D300S incorporates Nikon’s in-camera chromatic aberration correction technology, which is automatically applied to all JPEG images. RAW files are left untouched (as they should be), so they serve as a useful reference for the effectiveness of the correction.

We didn’t have a lens with particularly bad CA in-house when we tested the Nikon D300S, so reached back to our review of the Nikon D90 for a good example of what the technology can do. The D90’s 18-105mm kit lens had quite a bit of CR in the corners of the frame at some focal lengths, but you’d never know it from looking at its JPEGs. The crops above (at 200% size, to make it easier to see just how good the CA correction actually is) show results from the corner of a frame shot at 18mm on the D90. The results are pretty amazing: The rather pronounced CA seen in the uncorrected image at left (taken from a RAW file) is almost entirely invisible in the in-camera JPEG.

This CA-correction technology will work for both Nikon and third-party lenses, although Nikon claims it works better on Nikon-branded optics. We haven’t verified that claim; in our informal evaluation it has worked pretty well with most lenses we’ve looked at.

The images above were taken from our standardized test shots. For a
collection of more pictorial photos, see our
Nikon D300S Photo Gallery
.

Nikon D300S Exposure

Exposure Modes. As you’d expect from a digital SLR aimed at experienced photographers, the Nikon D300S eschews any hand-holding from Scene modes and the like, restricting its operating modes to the more traditional selection of Programmed Auto, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, and Manual. In Shutter Priority and Manual modes, shutter speeds from 1/8,000 to 30 seconds are available in 1/3 EV steps. The Manual mode also adds a Bulb setting for manually timed exposures whose length is limited only by available battery power.

A very nice touch that’s common to other Nikon DSLRs is that, while in Program AE mode, you can rotate the Command dial to select different combinations of aperture and shutter speed settings than those normally chosen by the autoexposure system. (That is, if the automatic program would have chosen 1/125 second and f/5.6, you could instead direct the camera to use 1/60 at f/8 or 1/30 at f/11, to get greater depth of field.) Nikon calls this Flexible Program, and photographers familiar with other brands may know it as Program Shift. It’s a very handy option for those times when you need some measure of increased control, but still want the camera to do most of the work for you. We personally use this capability more than Aperture- or Shutter-priority metering in our own shooting. The Nikon D300S also allows the step size used for aperture, shutter speed, ISO sensitivity, exposure compensation and exposure bracketing to be set to the user’s preference of either 1/3, 1/2 or 1EV steps. If you generally want fine-grained control over shutter speed and aperture, but find yourself occasionally wanting to make quicker adjustments, the camera can be set using Custom Setting f5 to temporarily use a 1EV step size for these variables while the Function button is held down.

An interesting feature when using Manual exposure mode is the electronic analog exposure display visible in the optical viewfinder data readout. This shows the amount the camera thinks an image will be over- or underexposed, based on the settings you have selected, and helps you find the best exposure for the subject.

Exposure Metering. Nikon has one of the most sophisticated and flexible metering systems currently on the market, and in the case of the Nikon D300S, its metering sensor covers a wide area of the frame with a 1,005-pixel RGB array. Like most SLRs, there are three main metering modes on the Nikon D300S: Matrix, Center-weighted, and Spot metering. Where Nikon’s system differs is in the capability of these modes. Nikon’s matrix metering (the default option on the D300S) is called 3D Color Matrix II, as it takes color as well as distance information from the lens into account.

By default, the Nikon D300S’s Center-Weighted metering mode gives a greater weight to an 8mm diameter circle in the center of the frame, although this can be changed with Custom Setting b5 to use either a 6mm, 10mm or 13mm spot, or to average the entire frame. Finally, Spot meters a 3mm diameter circle (about 2% of the frame) centered on the active focus area (Unless using a non-CPU lens or Auto-area AF, in which case the D300S behaves like most DSLRs in only metering the very center of the frame in Spot metering mode.)

An even more unusual feature of the Nikon D300S comes courtesy of Custom Setting b6, which allows fine-tuning of the camera’s metering system within a range of +/-1EV in extremely fine 1/6 EV steps. Three values can be set, allowing you to fine-tune Matrix, Center-weighted and Spot metering separately. This means that if you feel the camera to be under- or over-exposing scenes, you should be able to pull it back towards your preferred exposure without needing to dial in exposure compensation for most images. Another similarly useful feature for tuning the D300S to your tastes is Custom Setting c2, which allows the user to select how long the camera’s metering system should be powered on during a period of inactivity. This lets you balance battery life against convenience, within a nine-step range from a miserly four seconds to a spendthrift 30 minutes, as well as an option to leave the metering system powered on at all times. Note that when running on A/C power, the metering system remains powered on all the time, for convenience’s sake.

It’s important to note that 3D Color Matrix Metering II does rely on the use of a Type-G or -D lens. With other CPU lenses, the D300S falls back to Color Matrix Metering II, which doesn’t take account of distance information in exposure calculations. Non-CPU lenses can use Color Matrix Metering if the focal length and maximum aperture are manually specified, but otherwise fall back to Center-weighted metering. The 1,005-pixel RGB sensor also serves to ascertain automatic white-balance, and provides assistance for focus tracking when the subject leaves the AF sensor area. Metering range is specified at 0 to 20Â EVÂ in Matrix or Center-Weighted, and 2 to 20 EVÂ in Spot metering mode.

Exposure Lock. Ordinarily, the AE-L/AF-L button locks both exposure and autofocus, useful for off-center subjects in tricky lighting. It can be programmed for AE lock, AF lock, AE + AF lock, or no fewer than 19 other functions, via the custom menu. You can also program the button to toggle the lock on and off, rather than requiring the button to be held, and to perform a variety of functions when held while a command dial is turned, although by default the AE-L/AF-L button and command dials serve no function together.

Exposure Compensation. Exposure compensation on the Nikon D300S is adjustable from -5 to +5 exposure equivalents (EV) in 1/3, 1/2 or 1 EV step increments, and is controllable in Program, Aperture-priority, or Shutter-priority modes. Note that in Manual exposure mode, the EV button doesn’t actually vary the exposure – it only biases the electronic analog exposure display that’s shown in the optical viewfinder data readout. The Auto Bracketing feature on the Nikon D300S can capture anywhere from two to nine sequential shots of the same subject with varying exposure values. Exposure settings for bracketing can vary from -9 to +9 EV (values are added to the already chosen exposure compensation value), with step sizes of 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, or 1 EV units. Through the Custom Settings menu, you can designate whether the bracketing sequence adjusts the ambient and/or flash exposure, white balance, or Active D-Lighting. When bracketing white balance, note that the shutter is tripped only once and the camera then saves the bracketed exposures from the same source data. When using ADL bracketing, anywhere from two to five frames can be captured. For two frame bracketing, one frame has ADL disabled, and the other has a user-preset strength. For three shots, the camera brackets with ADL Off, Low, and Normal. Four shots adds High, while Extra High is the fifth shot bracketed.

ISO Sensitivity. The Nikon D300S’s normal ISO ranges from 200 to 3,200 and can be extended down to ISO 100 (Lo 1), and up to ISO 6,400 (Hi 1). By default, ISO is adjustable in 1/3 EV steps (Lo 1, Lo 0.7, Lo 0.3, 200, 250, 320, 400, 500, 640, 800, etc.). Through Custom Setting b1, the D300S can be set to allow sensitivity adjustment in 1/2 EV steps (Lo 1, Lo 0.5, 200, 280, 400, 560, 800, etc.), or in 1EV steps (Lo 1, 200, 400, 800, etc.) Nikon’s excellent Auto ISO feature is carried over as well, which allows you to set both the upper ISO limit (from ISO 400 to 6400)Â as well as the minimum shutter speed (selectable from 1s to 1/4000s) required before ISO is increased automatically.

White Balance. The Nikon D300S offers the usual white balance settings: Auto, six presets consisting of Incandescent, Fluorescent, Direct Sunlight, Flash, Cloudy, and Shade, a manual mode where white-balance is determined from a white or grey card or copied from an existing image, and a direct color temperature setting (2,500 to 10,000K). The Fluorescent preset has seven sub-settings consisting of Sodium Vapor (2,700K), Warm-white (3,000K), White (3,700K), Cool (4,200K), Day White (5,000K), Daylight (6,500K), and High Temperature Mercury Vapor (7,200K), and the manual setting allows five custom white-balance measurements to be stored.

As with a number of other high-end SLRs these days, all the D300S’s white balance presets and manual settings except for the direct color temperature settings are adjustable via a 2D fine-tuning grid display. The Nikon D300S also supports White Balance bracketing, where two to nine frames can be bracketed with Blue and/or Amber white balance bias increments of approximately 5, 10 or 15 mireds.

Active D-Lighting. D-Lighting has proven a popular post-processing feature in Nikon’s consumer digital SLRs, as well as some of the company’s point & shoot models. It’s a quick software process that attempts to overcome underexposed images, and bring detail out of shadows. An improved version of Active D-Lighting appeared in the Nikon D3 and D300, including optimization of image contrast, helping to prevent overprocessing of shadows and flattening of overall image contrast. The Nikon D300S inherits the same Active D-Lighting setup from the D300, featuring Extra-High, High, Normal, Low, and Off settings plus the ability to automatically choose the Active D-Lighting strength on the fly.

D300S Active D-Lighting
Active D-Lighting Off	Active D-Lighting Extra-High

The effect of Active D-Lighting is highly dependent on the particular subject and lighting being shot, but for the most part is fairly subtle. The thumbnails above show its effect on our Outdoor Portrait test, where you can see it opening up the shadows somewhat, while simultaneously holding back the highlights a little. We like that it’s generally subtle in its effect, as it’s so easy to overdo automatic tonal adjustments like this. (See the Nikon D300S Image Quality tab for more detail on how well Active D-Lighting performs.)

Lateral Chromatic Aberration Correction. While other cameras have had lens distortion processing built-in, (notably the Olympus E-1, quite some time ago, and more recently many Panasonic cameras), none until Nikon’s D3 and D300 did the processing based on the distortion detected in the image. Past cameras (and most distortion-correction software) simply looked at which lens was mounted and perhaps the focal length if it was a zoom lens, and then applied a pre-set amount of correction; no image analysis actually took place. Nikon’s Lateral Chromatic Aberration correction offered a more sophisticated approach, thanks to the power of the camera’s EXPEED processor, by actually analyzing each image after capture and fixing the chromatic aberration detected therein before saving the JPEG file. Cameras with high-resolution sensors place a greater demand on lenses, and hence Lateral Chromatic Aberration correction proves a useful feature on the Nikon D300S. There are no settings for this feature; it’s always enabled for JPEGs.

Nikon In-Camera CA Correction
200% Crop from Nikon D90, 18-105mm VR lens at 18mm Converted from RAW, no CA correction applied	200% Crop from Nikon D90, 18-105mm VR lens at 18mm Camera JPEG, Automatic CA correction applied

The crops above are actually taken from our review of the Nikon D90, but the D300S uses the same technology, and the D90 crops above make good examples, because its 18-105mm VR kit lens had quite a bit of CA in the corners at the wide-angle end. The crop at left was taken from an image converted from a RAW file from the D90, enlarged 200% to make the colored fringing caused by the CA more evident. As you can see, there’s quite a bit of CA present. The crop at right is from a camera JPEG, shot at the same time under identical conditions. The difference in CA is pretty amazing; the camera did a remarkably good job of eliminating it. (Click on either image to see the full-resolution images as they came from the camera and RAW converter.)

Picture Control. Nikon has standardized its Picture Control system so that camera settings for sharpening, contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue can be finely adjusted and ported to other Nikon digital SLRs that support the system. The D3 was the first camera compatible with the option, and all Nikon SLRs since, including the D300S follow the standard. The Nikon D300S has four presets called Standard, Neutral, Vivid, and Monochrome, and up to nine custom presets can be defined, named, saved, and copied. Sharpness can be adjusted in ten steps, along with an Auto setting; contrast, saturation, and hue can be adjusted in seven steps, while brightness is adjustable in three steps. There is also a five-step “Quick Adjust” setting which exaggerates or mutes the combined effect without having to adjust each slider individually. When Monochrome Picture Control is selected, Hue and Saturation are replaced by Filter Effects and Toning respectively. Filter Effects offers Off, Yellow, Orange, Red, and Green settings, while Toning offers B&W, Sepia, Cyanotype, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue Green, Blue, Purple Blue and Red Purple settings, with each of the colored settings offering seven adjustment steps. Of course, the Nikon D300S also offers sRGB and Adobe RGB settings, in a separate Color Space menu.

Noise Reduction. The Nikon D300S offers four levels of high ISO noise reduction: Off, Low, Normal, and High. For Low, Normal, and High settings, noise reduction is performed at ISO 800 and higher. When set to Off, minimal noise reduction is still performed at ISOs of 4,000 (HI 0.3) or above. High ISO noise reduction theoretically is not performed on RAW files (other than the embedded JPEG thumbnail), although there has been some data published by individuals on the Internet that suggests there may in fact be some NR applied in Nikon’s NEF files. (We haven’t investigated the issue thoroughly enough to take a position on it ourselves, though we are aware of the “median” filter Nikon applies to reduce the visibility of hot-pixels in longer exposures.) The Nikon D300S also offers long-exposure noise reduction for exposures longer than 8 seconds. When set to On, the camera takes a second exposure for the same duration with the shutter closed, and subtracts the “dark frame” from the first, to further reduce hot-pixel and amp noise.

Release Modes. The Nikon D300S’s release modes are selected via the lockable release mode dial, which surrounds the button cluster to the left of the camera’s prism. Release modes consist of Single Frame (S), Continuous Low-speed (CL), Continuous High-speed (CH), Quiet Shutter-release (Q), Self-timer, and Mirror Up (MUP). The Nikon D300S’s Continuous mode is rated by Nikon for up to 7 frames per second with the standard EN-EL3e battery pack, or as much as 8 fps with the optional MB-D10 battery grip and EN-EL4a battery. These figures apply only when shooting in 12-bit Raw, TIFF or JPEG formats; for 14-bit Raw shooting the burst rate drops to about 2.7 fps. The number of shots that can be captured in a Continuous-mode burst before the camera slows down varies, depending on the file type and image size, as well as the amount of fine detail in the scene for compressed filetypes. Nikon says that up to 44 Large/Fine JPEGs or 17-20 12-bit Raw files (depending on compression type) can be captured before the buffer fills, but our tests with a deliberately difficult-to-compress image showed the same capacity of 12-bit RAW files, but a limit of 26 large/Fine JPEGs. (Capacity for 14-bit RAWs was actually a fair bit higher, apparently due to the slower capture speed.) Of course, the number of consecutive shots could also be limited by available memory card space, if your card(s) are nearly full.

Quiet Shutter-release is similar to normal Single Frame mode; however, the camera reduces noise by disabling the beep sound when the camera focuses (the focus beep can also be disabled in the custom menu), and by delaying lowering of the mirror until the shutter button is released, separating the noise of this operation from that of the mirror being raised and the shutter fired. (The result is indeed a quieter shutter sound.) Self-Timer mode opens the shutter a programmable delay (2, 5, 10, or 20 seconds) after the shutter button is pressed. (Note that Self-Timer mode requires placing the bundled DK-5 eyepiece cap over the viewfinder to prevent stray light from affecting the exposure, and that Bulb exposures in Self-Timer mode will have a duration of 1/10th second.) Finally, Mirror Up mode allows the mirror to be locked up with a first press of the shutter button or corded remote release, and fires the shutter on a second press (or automatically, after a delay of 30 seconds), allowing camera shake caused by mirror slap to be reduced when shooting on a tripod. There is also an Exposure Delay option in Custom Setting d10 which delays the exposure one second after the shutter button has been pressed and the mirror raised.

Interval Timer Mode. Another useful feature on the Nikon D300S that first appeared on more expensive models is Interval Timer mode, which facilitates time-lapse photography by taking a series of images at preset intervals.

Nikon D300S Interval Timer Options
Interval Timer mode is accessed, from the bottom of the shooting menu
Start time can be set (HH:MM), or you can choose “Now”	Interval between shots can be set from 1 second to 24 hours
You can set anywhere from 1 – 999 Intervals, and from 1 – 9 shots each time the camera wakes up	Once everything is configured, hit the OK button, and you’re good to go!

As shown above, you can set the starting time for the series, as well as the time interval between shots, the number of shots to be captured after each interval, and the total number of intervals after which capture should cease. You can set hours, minutes, and seconds between each shot, and you can set a start time using 24-hour notation (HH:MM) from 00:00 to 23:59. (Make sure the camera’s timezone, date and time are correctly set!) You can also start immediately, using the “Now” option. This is a good way to capture a timeline of slower events, such as clouds passing across the sky, tidal changes, a flower opening, etc. As with the Self-timer mode, the bundled DK-5 eyepiece cap should be placed over the viewfinder to prevent stray light from affecting the exposure. Exposure, flash, Active D-Lighting and white balance bracketing are all possible during interval shooting, and all but the latter will override the shots per interval setting to capture the required number of bracketed exposures. (White balance bracketing will capture only the requested number of exposures, but then process each single exposure differently so as to create the separate WB-bracketed still image files.). Interval capture can be paused and resumed through the camera’s menu system, if needed.

Multiple Exposure Mode. The Nikon D300S allows anywhere from two to 10 exposures to be captured separately, and then combined in-camera into a single multiple-exposure image. This function allows effects similar to those that might have been obtained by intentionally winding back and re-exposing an image on a film camera. Up to 30 seconds is allowed between exposures, in addition to the time set in Custom Setting c4, “Monitor Off Delay” if Image Review is enabled – so a maximum of 10 minutes and 30 seconds between exposures is possible if the camera has sufficient battery life remaining. As they’re captured, the exposures can either be averaged by setting gain to “On”, or the brightness values from each exposure simply added up. The Multiple Exposure mode can be combined with the Interval timer function to automatically capture all the shots of the multiple exposure if desired, and it’s also possible to change white balance between exposures. Most other menu options are disabled during Multiple Exposure capture. Sadly, live view can’t be used to capture multiple exposures, so there’s no way to preview the effect and precisely align subjects by looking at the camera’s LCD display.

Retouch Menu. The Nikon D300S has an extensive Retouch menu, which is starting to rival what basic image editing software packages can do on a computer – so much so that some users may not feel the need to use a computer for Nikon D300S image editing at all. Retouch options include adjusting D-Lighting, red-eye correction, image cropping (trim), converting to monochrome, applying Skylight or Warm filter effects, adjusting color balance, image overlay for combining two RAW images into one JPEG, NEF (RAW) processing, resizing to small images (for TV, Web or email), movie trimming, and side-by-side comparison. Phew, that’s quite the list!

RAW Processing SubMenu. RAW-format files are pretty common on SLRs these days: They capture all the data as it comes from the sensor, usually without any processing applied. Manipulated on a computer with RAW-processing software, they let you make major white balance adjustments, minor exposure tweaks, and perform noise-reduction processing beyond what the camera can manage on its own. Like many of their other high-end SLRs, the Nikon D300S also lets you do this sort of processing right in the camera, via a sub-menu off the Retouch Menu.

Nikon D300S in-camera RAW processing
Here’s a screenshot showing a RAW file captured under a very yellow light source	Changing to a manual white balance setting lets us make a fresh JPEG with good color

As seen in the screen shots above, the Nikon D300S’s RAW processing menu gives you a lot of options. You can change the JPEG quality, image size, white balance, exposure compensation (within limits), Picture Control setting, High ISO noise reduction and color space of a file, generating a new JPEG. (The original RAW file itself and any JPEG is left untouched; a new file is created.) This can be pretty handy if you need to make a quick change to white balance or minor exposure tweak in the field, before uploading an image to beat a deadline.

The images above were taken from our standardized test shots. For a
collection of more pictorial photos, see our
Nikon D300S Photo Gallery
.

Not sure which camera to buy? Let your eyes be the ultimate judge!
Visit our Comparometer(tm)
to compare images from the Nikon D300S with those from other
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your own eyes decide which you like best!

Nikon D300S Performance

Nikon D300S Image Quality

Color

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Very good overall accuracy and saturation, with only minor shifts in hue and intensity.

In the diagram above, the squares show the original color, and the circles show the color that the camera captured. More saturated colors are located toward the periphery of the graph. Hue changes as you travel around the center. Thus, hue-accurate, highly saturated colors appear as lines radiating from the center. Click for a larger image.

Saturation. The Nikon D300S pushes strong reds and oranges, dark blues, and some greens just a little, but actually undersaturates some cyan tones slightly. Its overall color saturation is a bit higher than average for a semi-pro SLR, but results are pleasing and didn’t seem at all overdone. Most consumer
digital cameras produce color that’s more highly saturated (more intense)
than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people
like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. Here, with the color balanced properly for the light source, the Nikon D300S’s skin tones looked just about right. There were some slight pink tints in places, but overall skin tone looked very natural. Where
oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it’s very
easy for these “memory colors” to be seen as too bright, too pink,
too yellow, etc.

Hue. The Nikon D300S showed a few small color shifts relative to the mathematically precise translation of colors in its subjects, but its overall color accuracy was close to the best we’ve tested. Reds shifted very slightly toward orange, and cyan shifted a bit toward blue, as there were slight shifts in some oranges, greens, blues and purples. At the end of the day, though, color accuracy was very good and the camera did a good job distinguishing between hues in the orange-to-yellow range, countering what appears to be an increasingly common tendency in cameras we’ve tested lately. Hue is “what color” the
color is.

Saturation Adjustment
The Nikon D300S lets you adjust the image saturation and contrast in seven steps each, and sharpening in ten steps. As can be seen below, the saturation adjustment worked very well, providing a reasonably fine-grained adjustment over a useful range of control. (Although we’d personally like to see slightly smaller steps.) The saturation adjustment also has almost no impact on contrast. That’s how a saturation control should work, but we’ve often found interactions between saturation adjustments and image contrast (and vice versa) on the cameras we test.

Saturation Adjustment Examples
-3	-1	0	+1	+3

The table above shows results with several saturation settings, see the Thumbnails index page for more (look for the files named D300SOUTBSATx.JPG). Click on any thumbnail above to see the full-sized image.

See full set of test images with explanations See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sensor

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Good color with Manual and 2,600 Kelvin white balance settings, though warm results with Auto and Incandescent white balance. Average exposure compensation required.*

Auto White Balance +0.3 EV	Incandescent White Balance +0.3 EV
Manual White Balance +0.3 EV	2,600 Kelvin +0.3 EV

The Nikon D300S’s auto white balance had a difficult time with the very warm color balance of the household incandescent bulbs used in this shot, something we find disappointing in a camera in this price and performance range. But the D300S is by no means alone in this: Most cameras we test have trouble with this light source, and it’s important to note that this is far from the worst we’ve seen. The camera’s incandescent white balance setting is obviously tuned for the cooler-hued 3,200K color of professional studio lighting, so produces the slightly warm cast you’d expect here. The 2,600K and Manual settings produced much more accurate results. Skin tones and white values looked best with the manual option, as the 2,600K setting was just a hint cool (though still nearly accurate — and we could obviously have chosen a slightly higher Kelvin setting if we’d wanted to fiddle with it more). The Nikon D300S required +0.3 EV exposure compensation for this shot, which is about average among cameras we’ve tested. Overall color is quite good, though the blue flowers looked a touch purplish as they often do with this shot. (Many digital cameras reproduce these flowers with a darker, purplish tint, so the Nikon D300S actually performs a little better than average here.) Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.

* Note: These shots were captured with a Sigma 70mm f/2.8 macro lens, one of the sharpest lenses we’ve ever tested on SLRgear.com. We use Sigma 70mm lenses in most of our studio test shots because they are so sharp and are available on all major platforms with the exception of Four Thirds. For some reason, though, on some (but not all) Nikon bodies, the Sigma causes the camera’s exposure system to overexpose by somewhere between two thirds of a stop and a full stop. The D300S is one such body (as was the D90), as the exposure compensation settings used in the images above are lower than normal for this shot. Accordingly, the comments regarding exposure compensation required have been adjusted to match results we achieved with a Nikkor lens. Other than this exposure shift, the Sigma 70mm performs very well on Nikon bodies, so we continue to use it as our “reference” lens, due to its excellent optical qualities.

Outdoors, daylight
Good exposure and color outdoors, though slightly high contrast at the default setting. Very good highlight/shadow detail preservation, though, and options like D-Lighting, and Contrast adjustment are a help when faced with tough conditions like these.

Auto White Balance, +0.7 EV	Auto White Balance, 0 EV

The Nikon D300S handled tough outdoor lighting under harsh sunlight pretty well, and produced good overall color and exposure. The default contrast setting was a bit on the high side, but shadow and highlight detail in the “sunlit” Portrait shot shown above was excellent. Only a few highlights were clipped in the model’s shirt, pendant and some of the flowers, and only a few very deep shadows were lost as well. The +0.7 EV exposure compensation required to keep the model’s face bright was about average for this scene. The house shot was just slightly overexposed at 0 EV, but lost very few of the highlights or shadows. Color looks good outdoors as well, just a touch cool.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
Very high resolution, 1,700 lines of strong detail.

Strong detail to 1,700 lines horizontal Camera JPEG	Strong detail to 1,700 lines vertical Camera JPEG
Strong detail to 1,750 lines horizontal ACRprocessed RAW	Strong detail to 1,700 lines vertical ACRprocessed RAW

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 1,700 lines per picture height in both the horizontal and vertical directions in JPEGs. Complete extinction didn’t occur until around 2,600 lines in both directions. We were able to eke out a bit more resolution (perhaps 1,750 to 1,800 lines) in the horizontal direction with RAW files processed through Adobe Camera RAW, but not in the vertical direction. The ACR processed RAW images were crisper (thanks to strong/tight unsharp masking in Photoshop), but didn’t contain much more detail. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Very good detail but a hint soft straight from the camera, with relatively minor edge-enhancement on high-contrast subjects. Minimal noise suppression artifacts at base ISO.

Good definition of high-contrast elements, with only minor evidence of edge enhancement.	Subtle detail: Hair Noise suppression tends to blur detail in areas of subtle contrast, though detail remains strong in the darker parts of the model’s hair here.

Sharpness. The Nikon D300S produced very good detail, but there’s a slight softness overall, even when using the sharp Nikon 35mm f/1.8G prime lens at f/8 as was used for the house crop above left. f/8 is slightly beyond the diffraction limit on the D300S, but our testing on SLRgear showed that the sharpness loss from f/5.6 to f/8 was very slight: So the slight softness here is almost certainly the result of the camera’s low pass filter and its image processing, rather than any loss optically. Some minor edge enhancement artifacts are visible on high-contrast subjects such as the crop above left, but overall results are still quite good. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing color and tonal differences right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows only minimal detail loss due to noise suppression, as the darker areas of the model’s hair show a lot of detail. Individual strands are still distinguishable even in the lighter shadows, though they begin to merge as shadows deepen, and in places where the tone and color of adjacent strands is very close. All in all, a very good performance here. Noise-suppression
systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle
contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the
individual strands are lost and an almost “watercolor” look appears.

RAW vs In-Camera JPEGs
As noted above, the Nikon D300S does a pretty good job at capturing lots of detail, but JPEGÂ images are slightly soft at the default settings. A little more detail can be obtained from carefully processing RAW files, though, without introducing additional artifacts. Take a look below, to see what we mean:

Camera JPEG (Fine)	RAW via Nikon View NX	RAW via Nikon Capture NX 2	RAW via ACR

In the table above, mousing over a link at the bottom will load the corresponding crop in the area above, and clicking the link will load the full resolution image. Examples are all shot at ISOÂ 200, and include in-camera Fine JPEG, the RAW file processed through Nikon’s free ViewNX software, the RAW file processed through Nikon Capture 2.2, and the RAW file processed through Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) version 5.5, then sharpened in Photoshop. We used default settings for ViewNX and boosted the sharpening a little in Capture NX. For Adobe Camera Raw, we found best results with strong but tight 250% unsharp masking with a 0.3 pixel radius.

As is frequently the case, the demosaicing and sharpening in Adobe Camera and Photoshop deliver finer detail than either the camera or the manufacturer’s own software. Looking very closely at the images, ACR doesn’t actually extract any detail that wasn’t present in the JPEGs from either the camera itself or either of Nikon’s software packages; the main difference is in the fineness of the rendering. Fine details (the tree branches against the sky, for example) look a little coarser in the various Nikon renderings than in that from ACR/Photoshop. This isn’t without cost, though: While they don’t look as crisp, the Nikon renderings are smoother-looking. We’d personally go the Adobe (or other high-quality third-party RAW converter) route here if we were concerned about making the sharpest-looking print possible from the D300S’s files, but that approach would also require some color calibration and management to better match both reality and what the camera itself sees.

ISO & Noise Performance
Low noise at the lower sensitivity settings, with very good results up to ISO 800. However, detail loss to noise reduction takes a jump at ISO 1,600 and above.

Noise Reduction = Default
ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 1,600	ISO 3,200
	ISO 6,400

The Nikon D300S produced sharp, detailed images with low noise at its lower sensitivity settings, with noise increasing and detail degrading as you move to higher ISO settings. Detail was very good up to ISOÂ 400, with very little lost to noise or noise reduction. At ISOÂ 800, we see some minor smudging as high ISOÂ noise reduction kicks in, but detail is still pretty good, and chroma noise is low. At ISO 1,600, subject detail takes a bigger drop, with stronger blurring and more visible noise “grain.” Chroma noise is still pretty low, though. Images at 3,200 and ISO 6,400 are notably less detailed than those at lower sensitivity levels, and ISO 6,400 in particular shows a lot of chroma noise as well, in the form of yellow and purple blotches. Of course, the impact of noise and detail loss are highly dependent on the size the photos are printed at, and pixel-peeping on-screen has surprisingly little relationship to how the images look when printed: See the Print Quality section below for recommended maximum print sizes at each ISO.

A note about focus for this shot: We shoot this image at f/4, using one of three very sharp reference lenses (70mm Sigma f/2.8 macro for most cameras, 60mm f/2.8 Nikkor macro for Nikon bodies without a drive motor, and Olympus Zuiko 50mm f/2.0 for Four Thirds and Micro Four Thirds bodies). To insure that the hair detail we use for making critical judgements about camera noise processing and detail rendering is in sharp focus at the relatively wide aperture we’re shooting at, the focus target at the center of the scene is on a movable stand. This lets us compensate for front- or back-focus by different camera bodies, even those that lack micro-focus adjustments. This does mean, though, that the focus target itself may appear soft or slightly out of focus for bodies that front- or back-focused with the reference lens. If you click to view the full-size image for one of these shots and notice that the focus target is fuzzy, you don’t need to email and tell us about it; we already know it. 🙂 The focus target position will simply have been adjusted to insure that the rest of the scene is focused properly.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
Very high resolution with excellent highlight and shadow detail. Very good low-light performance, capable of capturing bright images in near darkness.

+0.3 EV	+0.7 EV	+1.0 EV

Sunlight:
The Nikon D300S handled the deliberately harsh lighting very well in the above test. Though contrast is a little high, shadow and highlight detail are both very good. The camera’s contrast adjustment also did a good job of decreasing overall contrast without producing strong color variations; see the section below. The +0.7 EV exposure did the best job here, as the model’s face was a bit too dim at +0.3 EV and we thought that too many highlights were lost at +1.0 EV. At +0.7 EV, only a few highights were blown in the bright flowers and the model’s shirt, while good detail was still preserved in the shadows. The very deepest shadows were a bit plugged, but we’d still call this a very good performance overall. These shots were captured with the Nikon D300S’s Active D-Lighting control set to its default of “Off.” (Also see our earlier note about exposure variance with the Sigma 70mm used for this shot: The EV adjustments described here are relative to nominal exposure with the Nikkor 60mm f/2.8 lens.)

Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here. In actual shooting conditions, be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown here; it’s better to shoot in open shade whenever possible.)

Contrast Adjustment
We really like it when a camera gives us the ability to adjust contrast and saturation to our liking. It’s even better when those adjustments cover a useful range, in steps small enough to allow for precise tweaks. Just as with its saturation adjustment, the Nikon D300S’s contrast setting meets both challenges, the contrast steps actually being a little finer than those for saturation, and thus even more to our liking.

Minimum Contrast
Contrast set to lowest, +0.7 EV	Contrast set to lowest, 0 EV

At its lowest contrast setting, the D300S did a really excellent job of preserving highlight detail, maintaining natural-looking skin tones, and holding nice detail in the shadows. The D300S captures good color outdoors, though just slightly on the cool side. Overall, very good results here, especially when the contrast setting is tweaked. (This is a really tough shot; the Nikon D300S does a better than average job handling it.)

Contrast Adjustment Examples
-3	-1	0	+1	+3

The series of shots above shows results with several different contrast adjustment settings, showing the minimum step size around the default, as well as both extremes. While you can see the extremes, it’s hard to really evaluate contrast on small thumbnails like these, click on any thumbnail to go to the full-size image.

One very nice feature of Nikon’s contrast adjustment is that it has very little effect on color saturation. Contrast and saturation are actually fairly closely coupled, it’s a good trick to be able to vary one with out the other changing as well. Nikon did a good job here.

Nikon’s Active D-Lighting
The series of shots below show the results of the available Active D-Lighting settings (once again, with an exposure compensation of +0.7 EV), used to preserve highlight and shadow detail in high contrast images. The Nikon D300S offers two additional options over the D300, which are the Extra High and Auto settings. Active D-Lighting is different from the touch-up menu’s D-Lighting, as it is performed during image capture instead of after. (It does affect only JPEG images though, Nikon very properly doesn’t apply tonal adjustments like this to RAW file data.)

Active D-Lighting Examples
Off	Low	Normal
High	Extra High	Auto

Nikon’s Active D-Lighting does a good job at preserving highlights while bringing up detail in the deep shadows. Not surprisingly, though, more noise is visible in the darker areas of the test shots above, and the shadow end of the tone curve is choppier and less smooth. (Active D-Lighting’s effect is a little subtle in shots like those above, that have broad areas of both very bright highlights and very deep shadows — You’ll notice more impact in shots that are over- or underexposed overall, or where the central subject is in shadow from significant backlighting.)

More Active D-Lighting Examples
Off	Low	Normal
High	Extra High	Auto

Here are the results with our Far-Field House shot. Again, the effect of Active D-Lighting is pretty subtle because not much of the image was overexposed to begin with. Also note the slight blue cast in the white trim of the house as the strength of Active D-Lighting is increased.

Â	1 fc 11 lux	1/2 fc 5.5 lux	1/4 fc 2.7 lux	1/8 fc 1.3 lux	1/16 fc 0.67 lux	1/16fc No NR
ISO 100	2 sec f2.8	4 sec f2.8	8 sec f2.8	15 sec f2.8	30 sec f2.8	30 sec f2.8
ISO 200	1 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8	4 sec f2.8	8 sec f2.8	15 sec f2.8	15 sec f2.8
ISO 400	0.5 sec f2.8	1 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8	4 sec f2.8	8 sec f2.8	8 sec f2.8
ISO 800	1/4 sec f2.8	0.5 sec f2.8	1 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8	4 sec f2.8	4 sec f2.8
ISO 1600	1/8 sec f2.8	1/4 sec f2.8	0.5 sec f2.8	1 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8
ISO 3200	1/15 sec f2.8	1/8 sec f2.8	1/4 sec f2.8	0.5 sec f2.8	1 sec f2.8	1 sec f2.8
ISO 6400	1/30 sec f2.8	1/15 sec f2.8	1/8 sec f2.8	1/4 sec f2.8	0.5 sec f2.8	0.5 sec f2.8

Low light. The Nikon D300S performed well here, able to capture usable images down to the 1/16 foot-candle light level (about 1/16 as bright as average city street lighting at night), at all ISOÂ settings. Color balance with auto white balance ended up being rather bluish, so we shot the images above using the D300S’s Manual white balance setting. Noise was quite low up to ISO 800, and even a higher ISOs, there’s still a lot of detail to work with when high ISO NR is set to “Off” (which still applies some filtering at ISOs over 3,200). The Nikon D300 gives you four options for high ISO noise reduction: Off, Low, Normal, and High, so you have some flexibility in deciding how much noise to trade for detail. Except for the “No NR” shots in the table above, these were all shot using the Normal NR setting, and Long Exposure NR was enabled, so was applied to exposures longer than eight seconds. There are a few hot pixels visible at high ISOs and very low light levels when NR is set to Off, but not as many as we normally see. We did not detect any banding issues.

The Nikon D300S’s phase-detection autofocus system also performed very well here, able to focus on the subject down to well below the 1/16 foot-candle light level with its AF assist light turned off, and in total darkness with it enabled. Even in Live View mode with contrast-detect autofocus, the D300S was able to focus down to below 1/16 foot-candle, which is very good. (Keep in mind that the longer shutter speeds here demand the use of a tripod to prevent any blurring from camera movement. A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don’t have a tripod handy.)

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level
that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical
city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that level should
be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim
lighting. (For example, a child’s ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) Digital SLRs like the Nikon D300S do much better than point & shoots, but you still shouldn’t expect a quick autofocus lock with moving subjects.

Output Quality

Print Quality
Great print quality, good color, sharp 13×19-inch prints.

The Nikon D300S’s printed output is really impressive, able to output usable 16×20-inch prints at ISO 100 with no sharpening at all. They’re slightly soft on close inspection, but really quite good at arm’s length. 13×19-inch prints are more like what we’d call sharp, though.

ISO 200 shots print the same as 100, producing a good 16×20 or great 13×19.

ISO 400 images also look just fine at 16×20, and of course are better 13×19.

ISO 800 shots show a noticeable improvement over the D300’s performance, turning out acceptable prints at 13×19 inches. And of course it tightens up quite nicely at 11×14 inches.

ISO 1,600 shots are soft at 13×19, but much better at 11×14. Only low-contrast areas are too soft, and that’s being picky.

ISO 3,200 shots are where quality takes the first real hit, but this setting still makes a decent 8×10-inch print.

ISO 6,400 shots lose too much detail in the low-contrast and transition areas to make a usable 8×10-inch print, but they still make a good 5×7.

Overall a great performance from the Nikon D300S, improving on its predecessor.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we’ve found that you can only tell just so much about a camera’s image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there’s no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon Pro9000 Mark II studio printer, and on the Pixma MP610 here in the office. (See the Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II review for details on that model.)

Nikon D300S Viewfinder

The Nikon D300S’s viewfinder remains unchanged from the D300. The viewfinder is rated at 100% coverage, and is a bright, pentaprism design with 0.94x magnification at 50mm and -1 diopter, and a 19.5mm eyepoint. A diopter adjustment dial to the top-right on the viewfinder eyepiece offers a diopter adjustment range of -2 to +1.

The focusing screen is a fixed (non-interchangeable) type B BriteView Clear Matte Mark II screen. A framing grid (shown below) can be displayed on demand via a Custom menu setting. The active focus area can be highlighted in red or black (normally, the active area is highlighted in black only). There are three AF Point Illumination Custom settings available: Auto, which highlights when needed to establish contrast with the background; On, which always highlights, and Off, which disables the red highlighting.

The data readout below the focusing screen is also essentially identical to that of the D300, except that the Nikon D300S no longer displays the PC mode indicator in the viewfinder. (PC mode indicator is displayed in the top panel LCD.)

The graphic (courtesy of Nikon USA) and table below shows what information is displayed in D300S’s viewfinder.

Viewfinder Test Results

Coverage
Very good accuracy with the optical viewfinder, excellent on the LCD monitor in Live View mode.

70mm, Optical	70mm, Live View LCD

The Nikon D300S’s optical viewfinder proved quite accurate, with almost 99% coverage when measured with our Sigma 70mm f/2.8 test lens. This is very good, but just short of the 100% coverage Nikon claims. That said, though, it’s tough to frame to within a percent or two when squinting through a viewfinder eyepiece, so the actual accuracy could be a shade higher than we measured here. The resulting image is slanted very slightly to the left, which is unfortunately quite common with optical viewfinders these days. The amount of tilt in the D300S’s viewfinder is very slight indeed, though. The camera’s Live View LCD mode was extremely accurate, with essentially 100% coverage in our measurements.

Nikon D300S Live View

The Nikon D300S retains the Live View functionality previously featured in the D300 and is almost unchanged. The only significant differences are found in the physical controls, and the available information displays.

A very welcome enhancement to the Nikon D300S’s Live View mode is its one-touch activation, via the Live View button. On the D300, Live View mode had to be selected via the Drive Mode wheel on the left side of the camera’s top panel; a somewhat cumbersome arrangement. By contrast, the Nikon D300S sports an Lv button on its rear panel, in somewhat cumbersome reach of your thumb. Press it at any time and the mirror flips up and the camera enters Live View mode. It’s an arrangement we’ve previously seen on the D90, and it does a lot to make Live View a much more fluid part of your photography than it was in the past.

The second feature carried over from the D90 for the Nikon D300S’s Live View mode is the optional full information display. The Live Mode shooting info display shows you a lot of what you’d normally see looking through the viewfinder, yet manages to keep most of the information out of the way of the live image area. Information displayed includes current metering mode, shutter time, aperture, exposure compensation, ISO setting, shots remaining, exposure mode, file mode (RAW or JPEG), and white balance setting. It also shows microphone status and minutes/seconds of movie recording available at the current resolution and quality settings. There’s also an optional gridline display that helps in precise subject alignment, and a newly added virtual horizon overlay that assist in getting the camera perfectly level in two axes.

Nikon D300S Live View Data Displays
The Nikon D300S’s Live View display includes a good bit of relevant shooting data, including shooting mode, autofocus mode, image size, image quality, white balance, audio recording, time remaining, metering mode, shutter speed/aperture, exposure compensation, ISO, and more.	Pressing the Info button cycles through the four available display modes. This display shows the minimum amount of information, only overlaying the focus area. Not shown are “no card” and low battery warning overlays, which appear on all displays when active.
New additions include framing guides…	…and the nifty virtual horizon function.

One thing we miss in the Nikon D300S, though, is the live histogram display that’s an option on the Nikon D3 and on some competing SLRs from Nikon’s arch-rival Canon. A live histogram would have been especially useful because the D300S’s Live View display does not actually simulate exposure. Live View will show the effect of exposure compensation applied to Program, Shutter, and Aperture priority modes, but you get no preview of over or underexposed settings, nor is an analog exposure meter shown in the Live View display. The aperture and shutter speed shown at the bottom of the display are the values that were set when Live View mode was enabled; they are not continuously updated in response to lighting changes like they are in the viewfinder or LCD panel when Live View mode is off (if Live View is active, the top Status LCD is also not updated with new automatic settings as lighting changes). This implies the D300S always uses the dedicated 1,005-pixel RGB metering sensor for determining exposure regardless of Live View mode, and doesn’t attempt to meter using image sensor data (except while recording video). In Hand-held mode, the exposure values are updated after autofocus, because the metering sensor is briefly active during AF. But in Tripod mode, exposure values remain static even after focusing. Tripod mode assumes the lighting has not changed, so it really is designed to be used in a studio environment where lighting is controlled. This means it is possible to capture improperly exposed images even though they looked fine in the preview, if you’re not careful. Of course, the aperture and/or shutter speed values will update in response to the user changing them via a command dial.

Like the D300 before it, the Nikon D300S provides two modes for autofocus operation. Handheld mode uses the camera’s dedicated phase-detection sensor. Tripod mode, meanwhile, uses contrast detection on a feed from the image sensor. As Nikon’s naming clearly suggests, Handheld mode is the more useful of the pair for shooting handheld and/or moving subjects, since the AF operation itself is faster. Tripod mode is more useful for static subjects with the camera mounted on a tripod, offering two main benefits: you can move the AF point anywhere you want within the frame area, and front- or back-focusing issues shouldn’t come into play. Unlike the D90 and some of the competition, the Nikon D300S does not offer a face-detection focusing option.

Nikon D300S Live View Contrast-Detect Autofocus
One advantage of contrast-detect AF is that you can put the AF box wherever you like it. When focus is locked, the focus box changes from red to green.

By way of explanation, the phase-detect/contrast-detect distinction is one of the fundamental differences that separates digicams from digital SLRs, and is the core reason that SLRs focus more quickly. Contrast-detection autofocus involves looking at the image from a camera’s main image sensor and evaluating it to see how abruptly brightness values change from one pixel to the next. If an image is soft and fuzzy, brightness changes between adjacent pixels will be relatively slight, but if it’s sharply focused, they’ll be much greater. The point of ideal focus is found by moving the lens elements back and forth and determining whether the contrast signal gets stronger or weaker. Achieving focus this way necessarily involves some back-and-forth hunting, which can take a while to accomplish, since there’s no indication as to how close the camera is to focus nor which direction focus needs to be adjusted.

Hand-held mode. The phase-detection AF array is shown in Hand-held mode, very similar to the optical viewfinder. Unlike contrast-detect mode, the red focus area box does not turn green when focus is achieved. Otherwise, the displays available in this mode are very similar to Tripod mode.

By contrast, phase-detect AF uses a system of prisms, lenses, and a secondary sensor to determine not only whether the image is in focus, but by how much it’s out of focus and in which direction. The camera can then adjust the focus setting to exactly the position needed in a single step. As a result, phase-detect AF systems are generally much faster than contrast-detect ones. The catch with phase-detect AF, though, is that it requires some of the light passing through the lens to be diverted to the focus sensor. This is fine in an SLR when the mirror is down between exposures, as part of the mirror is typically partially transmissive, with the light passing through it deflected by a secondary mirror down to the AF sensor, usually located in the bottom of the mirror box. When the mirror is raised in Live View mode, though, light from the lens can’t get to the separate AF sensor. This makes Handheld mode’s AF operations rather lengthy (and noisy): To focus the camera the mirror has to be dropped, focus determined, and the mirror raised again, adding several tenths of a second to the normal non-Live-view shutter lag.

As an example of the relative speed of each mode, when we tested the Nikon D300S in the lab, we measured a shutter lag of 0.225 second when using the optical viewfinder and a single AF point. This increased to 0.473 second in Live View mode, all other settings being the same. In contrast-detect AF mode, it took an average of 2.5 seconds for Tripod mode to determine that the lens was in focus, even when starting with the lens already focused on the target. (It can easily take several seconds for the camera to slew a lens from infinity to close focusing in this mode.)

In Tripod mode, the Nikon D300S provides up to a 13x magnification in Live View mode, centered around the focus area, providing excellent focus discrimination when focusing manually. This is pretty important, as less than about 10x magnification really doesn’t do the trick for getting the focus set right, but at 13x we could nail the focus every time. In Hand-held mode, the amount of magnification available is limited to 3x.

The Nikon D300S also offers the ability to control the camera from a computer remotely, and that includes receiving a Live view image from the camera. You can focus, adjust settings, and fire, all from a computer. What’s more, you can do it via cable or Wi-Fi connection, with the optional Wi-Fi adapters. The D300S requires Nikon’s optional Camera Control Pro software to enable this feature. Software for a similar feature comes bundled with Canon’s SLRs.

Despite the improvements over the D300, we think the Nikon D300S is still lagging some of its rivals when it comes to its Live view implementation.

Nikon D300S Video

Nikon was the first company to introduce video recording capability in a digital SLR, with last year’s D90 digital SLR. Since then, video recording has gone on to become the must-have feature in just about every DSLR announcement, and so it’s no surprise to see the Nikon D300S likewise sporting video capability. The D300S’ video mode is largely similar to that of the D90, with a couple of important changes. Contrast detection autofocusing is now possible during video recording (albeit with some adverse effects on video and audio quality), and the D300S also now sports an external stereo microphone jack.

Resolution & Recording Time
The Nikon D300S’s movie resolutions include 1280×720 (16:9), 640×424 (3:2), and 320×216 (3:2). Video is recorded in Motion JPEG format, in .AVI files. Recording times are limited to five minutes per clip for HD mode, and 20 minutes per clip for the latter two modes. Nikon hasn’t explained the reason for the limit as of this writing, but it’s likely due to sensor heating issues that might start to degrade image quality. The frame rate is 24 frames per second, and audio from the built-in microphone is monaural, while a standard 3.5mm stereo input jack caters for external microphones. Approximate maximum file sizes of the two larger sizes both seem to be about 600-800MB. The shorter maximum recording time of the higher resolution option seems to about balance the longer recording time of the lower resolution, producing the same size files overall. Nikon says that recording will stop at 2 GB even if it’s been less than the 5 or 20 minute time limit in the various modes, but we never made a file larger than 800 MB, regardless of subject choice. (Subjects with lots of fine detail will produce larger images, as the fine detail is harder for the motion JPEG processing used in the D300S to compress.)

Movie settings. Resolution, microphone sensitivity, and destination card are the only options available for movie recording.

The Nikon D300S’s movie recording is accessed from Live view mode: You just press the center button in the multi-selector to start or stop recording at any time. Autofocus can be set automatically or manually both before and during movie recording (with some limitations described below), and the zoom can also be set manually at any time. Focus and zoom operation is likely to result in motor / handling noise being recorded on the audio track, although use of an external microphone that is distanced from the camera body should help minimize these issues.

Of course, one of the big advantages of being able to record movies with a Nikon SLR is that you have the full spectrum of Nikon lenses available to you, ranging from ultrawide angle and fisheye lenses all the way to ultra telephotos. You can also obviously use special lenses like the LensBaby Composer for special effects. (While the D300S’s video is more oriented toward the making of quick “video snapshots,” we can imagine some pros using it just to be able to incorporate special effects like the LensBaby look into their productions.)

Frame Rate
The Nikon D300S captures movies at 24 frames/second, the same frame rate used in the motion picture industry. This produces reasonably smooth motion, but we found that rapidly moving subjects close to the camera could look a little jumpy, the same as they do at your local cinema. If you’ve been using a digicam with a frame rate of only 15 frames/second (fairly common a generation or two back), the D300S’s 24 fps will be a welcome upgrade. On the other hand, if you’ve recently been using a digicam with 30 fps capture, you may find the D300S’s video slightly less smooth. Once again, this probably isn’t critical for “snapshot” videos, but it’s another indication why the D300S really isn’t a substitute for a dedicated camcorder.

Focusing
Prior to recording, you can let the camera set focus during Live View in one of two ways – either the Handheld or Tripod modes. Handheld mode will use the camera’s normal (phase detection) autofocus system, which is pretty fast, but briefly interrupts the live-view feed so the reflex mirror can be lowered to let light reach the dedicated AF sensor. Alternately, Tripod mode uses the D300S’s contrast-detect focusing, which operates on data streaming from the image sensor, and is rather slow: Expect it to take two or three seconds, longer if it has to move the lens elements a lot.

Once movie recording has started, the Handheld mode autofocusing option isn’t available (and half-pressing the shutter button or pressing the AF-ON button while in Handheld mode will stop video recording to perform the AF operation). Autofocus is still available during movie capture when set to Tripod mode, but this uses the slower contrast-detection AF. The autofocus operation will be noticeable in the video track itself, as the camera briefly seeks back and forth to determine the precise point of focus. Sound from the AF motors is also likely to be picked up in the audio track, especially when using the internal microphone.

A/V ports. The top jack is for composite video / mono audio out. The Type-C mini HDMI connector to the right supports 1080i, 720p, 576p or 480p digital video with stereo digital audio. The mic jack is 3.5mm stereo.

While better than the previous generation of DSLR video which didn’t offer AF during recording at all, the limitations on autofocus during movie recording with the Nikon D300S will probably still give many potential owners pause, as focus is so critical in still photography and dealing with moving subjects would seem to make it even more so. In practice though, we were surprised to find it not nearly the issue we expected it to be. This may be because the lower resolution in video mode greatly increases the effective depth of field: Subjects that would be well out of focus when shot at the D300S’s maximum still-image resolution of 12.3 megapixels often looked just fine when viewed at even the maximum video resolution of 1,280 x 720. Lower resolutions only increase this effect. And it’s not just the resolution, either, the video compression introduces quite a bit of softness on a frame-by-frame basis, further masking softness due to defocusing.

Of course, manual focusing remains available for those who can’t live with the limitations of DSLR video AF, and will allow a new generation to learn what it means to “pull focus” while recording movies, as the point of interest move from one subject to another, or if the subject moves significantly closer to or further from the camera during a segment. “Focus pulling” is a cinematic technique often performed by someone other than the camera operator, who is usually too busy framing the image to attend to focus as well. But millions of Nikon D300S owners will be able to try a technique that few camcorder owners can.

In our own admittedly limited playing with video recording on Nikon’s DSLRs, we’ve found that pulling focus during a recording is a skill that requires some learning, particularly if there are things going on in the scene that need paying attention to. If we knew the approximate locations where the subject would be at the start and end of a clip (think of a video of a Little Leaguer sliding into home), we could check the corresponding positions of the focus ring and then try to repeat them while the action was taking place. This was a little hard to do with only a ring to grab onto, as the tactile reference for the different focus positions was pretty weak; a lever would have made the starting and stopping positions much more evident and easier to remember. As we expected when we reviewed the Nikon D90’s video mode, aftermarket gadgets have begun to appear that aim to solve some of the issues with handling and focusing DSLRs during video recording.

If you don’t know in advance how the subject is going to move, you can try to judge focus from the image on the D300S’s rear-panel LCD and adjust accordingly. The exceptional resolution and sharpness of the LCD makes this more practical than it might sound. Once again, some practice (and inherently good reflexes) are required, but given enough practice, it could work reasonably well.

Audio
The Nikon D300S has an internal microphone concealed behind three small holes on the front of the camera body. The D300S also provides for an external mic, courtesy of a 3.5mm stereo input jack under a flap on the left side of the camera’s body – a very useful upgrade from the D90’s fixed internal, monaural microphone. Another upgrade from the D90 is adjustable sensitivity for the microphone. There are three sensitivity levels to choose from (Low, Medium and High), along with Auto gain, and Off settings. The settings apply to the built-in microphone as well as to an external mic. We found the D300S’s internal microphone to be quite sensitive when using Auto gain. It has no problem picking up even quiet conversation from across a room, as long as there are no background noises. Ah, but there’s the rub: The mic will pick up all sorts of background noise if you’re not careful. Given that most users will likely be using the D300S’s video recording for short clips of memorable moments, its tendency to pick up every sound is probably a positive feature. For those wanting the best audio quality, an external microphone will almost certainly prove a better choice however, allowing selection of a microphone with the desired characteristics, as well as reducing the effects of noise from handling the camera body or using the focus and zoom mechanisms. The selectable microphone sensitivity is also a welcome improvement.

Audio is recorded with a bit depth of 16-bits and a sampling rate of only 11.025 kHz. That’s a pretty low sampling rate. The Nikon D3S records audio at 44.1 kHz while the Canon 7D and many camcorders record at 48 kHz, so the D300S’s recorded audio isn’t high quality.

Rolling Shutter Artifact (“Jello Effect”)
There was one aspect of the Nikon D300S’s video that we found less than wonderful, though, namely the way its progressive data readout from the sensor chip can produce distortions in the image when the camera or subject moves suddenly. The D300S records its movies at 24 frames/second, but like all digital SLRs, the way it clocks data off its sensor chip means that it takes some time to read out each frame – on the order of 1/24 second for the D300S. By contrast, most camcorders grab each frame at a single moment in time, with all of the pixels in the image acquired simultaneously.

The consequence of this progressive capture is that any movement of the camera or subject between the beginning of a given frame’s capture and the end of it will produce distortions in the shape of the image.

We first noticed this effect while reviewing the D90, when panning rapidly to follow fast motion: Trees and buildings would appear to lean opposite the direction of our panning. On the other hand, if you’re panning slowly to take in a larger scene, you’re not likely to notice the effect at all. More disconcerting, once we became sensitized to the phenomena, we noticed our video subjects “jiggling” slightly in response to even fairly minor camera shake as we were hand-holding the D90, and the D300S suffers the very same issues. Lens-based IS helps with this somewhat, but we’d be much happier if Nikon could figure out a way to grab the image data all at once and then read it off to the memory card before starting the next frame grab.

Exposure
You can control the aperture used for movies by selecting Aperture Priority or Manual exposure mode prior to entering Live View mode. The smallest aperture supported for movies is f/16, regardless of the lens attached. Shutter speed and ISOÂ sensitivity are always under the control of the camera. It appears that the D300S’s autoexposure during movie recording is performed by varying sensitivity and/or shutter speed in steps (1/3 EV?)Â rather than being continuously variable, which can lead to some abrupt, stepped changes in exposure. Only matrix metering is supported during movie capture, however exposure compensation can be adjusted up to +/- 3 EV while recording, and exposure can be locked using the AE-L/AF-LÂ button. You can apply Nikon’s Picture Controls as well as specify the color space for movies, as long as they are selected before recording begins. This is useful if you’d like to for instance record in monochrome, or with more saturated colors, etc.

Video Examples: Dave shot some examples of video with the D300S, so you can see what the different resolution levels look like. Click on any of the thumbnails below to bring up each video in a new window.

Nikon D300S Video Examples

Three Video Sizes
Options include 1,280 x 720, 640×424, and 320 x 216 pixels, all at 24 frames/second
(Click on any thumbnail to launch/download the movie in a new window)

1,280 x 720 pixel video (but JPEG compression hides detail you’d see in that size still image)
640 x 424 pixel video	320 x 216 pixel video

As noted earlier, the Nikon D300S’s video imagery is not only considerably lower resolution than its still images, but the heavy JPEG compression applied to the video frames further reduces detail. The upside of this is that the effective depth of field is quite a bit greater than you’d find in its still images at similar focal length and aperture. Note in some of the shots how little the apparent focus changes as wonder-dog Charlotte runs toward or away from the camera.

In the highest-res shot above, the lens was initially focused somewhere between Marti and the camera, so she’s a little soft at the start of the clip. That said, I found it quite surprising how little apparent sharpness changed as Charlotte approached and receded from the camera.

Depth of field
One of the key benefits to shooting video with a digital SLR is the narrow depth of field available to an SLR’s lenses. Below you can see two videos, one shot wide open, and the other stopped down.

It’s easier to isolate your subject from the background when shooting with a wider aperture.

Here the background is distracting thanks to the greater depth of field, but of course there are times when you want that too, as in landscape photography.

Nikon D300S Flash

Like the D300 before it, built into the D300S is an unusually capable pop-up flash unit, which operates in one of five main modes: Front-Curtain Sync, Red-Eye Reduction, Red-Eye Reduction with Slow Sync, Slow Sync, and Rear-Curtain Sync. Front-Curtain Sync fires the flash at the beginning of the exposure, with every shot. Red-Eye Reduction mode fires the (very bright) AF-assist light before the main flash exposure, to reduce the Red-Eye Effect in shots of people. Red-Eye Reduction with Slow Sync works in a similar fashion, but combines the flash with a slower shutter speed for night portraits. (This reduces the harsh effect of nighttime flash shots, allowing more of the ambient illumination into the picture.) Slow Sync mode works with shutter speeds as slow as 30 seconds to preserve color in night shots. Finally, Rear-Curtain Sync fires the flash at the end of the exposure rather than at the beginning, producing light trails that appear to follow (rather than precede) moving subjects. In all flash modes, the flash fires with every exposure. Closing the flash disables it completely. Holding down the Flash Mode button while turning the Sub-command dial adjusts the overall brightness of the flash from -3 to +1 EV in one-third-step increments.

One notable difference in the Nikon D300S’s specs over those of the D300 is that its flash is rated for coverage up to a 16mm wide angle. While we hadn’t explicitly tested the wide-angle coverage of the D300, a quick test of the D300S with an ultra wide-angle lens showed that coverage at 16mm is rather uneven. We’re not sure how flashes are rated for angular coverage, but we don’t personally consider the D300S’s flash as being adequate for 16mm lenses.

Besides the main flash modes listed above, the D300S’s onboard speedlight can also be used in manual mode, as a repeating flash, or as a commander in Nikon’s Creative Lighting System. (See below for more on that last item.) The D300S’s internal flash is fairly powerful, with a guide number of 12 meters or 39 feet at ISO 100 in auto mode, extending slightly to 13 meters (43 feet) in manual mode. (The greater range in manual mode is because it doesn’t have to expend energy on the metering pre-flash.)

The built-in flash’s normal X-Sync speed is 1/250s, but there’s a 1/320s (Auto FP) option at reduced range. FP flash sync speeds as high as 1/8000s are available the with optional SB-900, SB-800, SB-600 or SB-R200 external flash units.

Repeating Flash Options

While we’ve never personally felt a need for a stroboscopic flash on a camera, we can imagine it being used for a variety of creative effects, as well as being highly useful for scientific applications. The D300S’s onboard speedlight can be used as a stroboscope, using the Repeating Flash option on custom setting menu e3. Through this menu, you can set the power level from 1/128 to 1/4 power, the number of flashes from 2-35, and the frequency of flash pulses from 1 to 50 Hz (1-50 shots/second). As you might expect, the number of times you can have the flash fire varies inversely with the power of each discharge: At the maximum 1/4 power, you can only get two pops in rapid succession. The maximum of 35 flashes in sequence is only possible at the 1/128 power setting, moving up to 1/64 power decreases the maximum number to 25, and so on. Also note that you’ll of course have to have a long enough shutter time to accommodate your flash series, so you’ll likely have to visit custom setting menu e2, to change the maximum shutter time permitted with the flash.

Also included on the Nikon D300S is an external flash hot shoe, just behind the pop-up flash compartment, and a PC sync terminal on the left panel. The hot shoe accommodates Nikon accessory flash units, as well as a wide range of third party flashes. The full range of flash sync modes remains available for compatible flash units, but third-party models may not support all modes.

3D Color Matrix II Flash Metering
The “3D” aspect of the Nikon flash metering system is that it uses subject distance information from the lens (only available with lenses that contain CPUs) to guide its exposure decisions. This is particularly key with flash exposures, because flash illumination falls off quite strongly as the subject gets further from the camera. We at IR are huge fans of Nikon’s flash technology; it’s really a case of technology working perfectly in the service of creativity. The camera just quietly does its job, so you can focus on composition, color, interacting with your subjects, etc. It doesn’t remove the creative decisions of how you want to light your subject, it simply removes the technical legerdemain from the equation. It won’t by any means turn a duffer into a pro photographer, but it’ll certainly take an average shooter a long way in that direction.

The D300S with Nikon’s Creative Lighting System

Nikon has long been a leader in flash technology, but in late 2003, they significantly upped the ante, by announcing their Creative Lighting System. This system of flashes and supporting camera bodies lets the photographer control up to three separate groups of remote flash units, with an essentially unlimited number of individual strobes in each group. The exposure and operating mode of each group of flashes can be controlled independently, and exposure is metered through the lens (TTL) for all units.

Flash Commander Mode

On the D300S, the internal strobe can both act as a controller and also contribute to the exposure; it can control two groups of remote strobes, and can use any of the four available channels to communicate on. The screenshots at right give some idea of the options available. The built-in flash can operate in either TTL or Manual exposure mode. In TTL mode, you can vary its exposure over a range of -3 to +3 EV. In Manual mode, you can vary its power from full power (1/1) to 1/128 power. Each of the two groups of remote flash units can be operated in either TTL, AA (Auto Aperture), or Manual mode. Auto Aperture mode is the exposure mode that will be familiar to users of non-TTL metered autoexposure flash units, in which you set the camera at a given aperture setting, and then the flash measures the light reflecting back at it and adjusts its output to produce a given level of reflected light. The remote flash groups can be adjusted over a +/- 3EV auto exposure range or the same 1/1 to 1/128 power levels as the built-in flash unit.

This degree of control directly from the camera is really remarkable, and can save you some serious money if you’re planning on taking advantage of Nikon’s Creative Lighting System. If you don’t need to control more than two groups of external strobes, you won’t need to buy an SB-900, saving you at least $400 at retail. If you’re interested in macro flash photography, you won’t need the SU-800 controller that comes as part of Nikon’s R1C1, going with the simpler R1 kit instead. That’ll save you a good $200-250 at retail. Likewise, compared to Canon’s wireless flash system, there’s no need for a separate controller with the D300S, again saving you several hundred dollars.

A full treatment of this system is beyond the scope of this review of the D300S, but we have a bit more detail on it posted as a separate article: See our Nikon Creative Lighting System review for more info.

Flash Test Results

Coverage and Range
Slightly above average exposure compensation required, but a fairly powerful flash.

Flash coverage, at 16mm (Shot with Nikon 12-24mm DX lens)
Normal Flash, +1.0 EV	Slow-Sync Mode, 0 EV

Coverage and Exposure. We normally only include images showing flash coverage (how evenly the flash illuminates the frame) for cameras sold with kit lenses, but in the case of the Nikon D300S, the specs claim coverage for up to a 16mm wide angle lens. Since this is an unusually wide angle, we attached a Nikkor 12-24mm lens to the D300S, set it to 16mm, and shot the above image with it. While the lens itself has some falloff in the corners of the frame, the bulk of what we see above is the fault of the flash. It covers a fairly wide angle, but we personally wouldn’t consider it to be true 16mm coverage.

When it came to exposure, the D300S’s flash underexposed our Indoor Portrait subject somewhat at its default setting, requiring a +1.0 EV exposure compensation adjustment (the average is about +0.7 EV for this shot). The camera’s Slow-Sync flash mode produced a good exposure at 0 EV, though with a stronger orange cast from the background incandescent lighting.

Manufacturer-Specified Flash Range
60mm
10 feet at f/5.6 ISO 200

Manufacturer Specified Flash Range. The Nikon D300S’s flash is rated with a GN of 17 (m) at ISO 200 in i-TTL mode. That works out to be about 10 feet at f/5.6, as shown in the test shot above, captured with the Nikkor 60mm f/2.8 DX lens. In the shot above, the Nikon D300S produced a slightly dim exposure (underexposed by about 0.6 EV), not quite meeting its specification at the rated distance with its ISO set to 200.

Note: Our standard test method for flash range uses a fixed setting of ISO 100, to provide a fair basis of comparison between cameras. This wasn’t performed for the D300S, as flash range is lens dependent, and the camera ships body-only in the US. We have however also begun shooting using the manufacturer-specified camera settings, at the range the company claims for the camera, to assess the validity of the specific claims. The specified range has been calculated for the lens and aperture used in the test shot above.

Nikon D300S High ISO Noise Reduction

The D300S’s four noise-reduction settings also allow you quite a bit of flexibility in choosing how you want to make the tradeoff between subject detail and noise levels. It’s not clear that the “off” setting truly eliminates the noise processing altogether, but it is true that it leaves a lot of fine/subtle subject detail there for you to work with. The combination of shooting with NR turned off and using a good noise-filtering program after the fact can produce very clean images with lots of fine detail in them.

See for yourself how the noise reduction works under both daylight and tungsten-balanced lighting. Click on any of the crops below to see the corresponding full-sized image.

High ISO Noise Reduction Comparison Daylight-balanced illumination
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 8 0 0
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 1 6 0 0
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 3 2 0 0
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 6 4 0 0

The above crops show the effects of the 4 levels of high ISO noise reduction, under our studio HMI lighting we use to simulate daylight. Note that some minimal NR is still performed at ISO 3,200 and above when High ISO NR set to “Off”. We prefer the “Low” setting, as the default “Normal” is a bit too aggressive for our tastes.

How does the Nikon D300S compare with the previous D300 and other competing cameras? See the following table which compares at the default Noise Reduction setting.

High ISO Comparison with Nikon D300, Canon 7D, Pentax K7 (All default NR) Daylight-balanced illumination
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Canon 7D	Pentax K7
I S O 8 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Canon 7D	Pentax K7
I S O 1 6 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Canon 7D	Pentax K7
I S O 3 2 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Canon 7D	Pentax K7
I S O 6 4 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Canon 7D	Pentax K7
I S O 1 2 8 0 0	N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported	N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported		N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported
	N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported	N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported		N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported
	N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported	N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported		N/A ISO 12,800 Not Supported

As you can see, the Nikon D300S performs very similarly to its predecessor, and holds its own against the competition. Keep in mind these shots used the default noise reduction settings. To see how the sensors actually compare in terms of high ISO noise, see our Nikon D300S RAW comparison page.

Nikon D300S Imatest Results

We routinely use Norman Koren’s excellent “Imatest” analysis program for quantitative, thoroughly objective analysis of digicam test images. I highly recommend it to our technically-oriented readers, as it’s far and away the best, most comprehensive analysis program I’ve found to date.

My comments below are just brief observations of what we see in the Imatest results. A full discussion of all the data Imatest produces is really beyond the scope of this review: Visit the Imatest web site for a full discussion of what the program measures, how it performs its computations, and how to interpret its output.

Here’s some of the results produced by Imatest for the Nikon D300S:

sRGB Accuracy Comparison
Nikon D300S	Canon 7D	Nikon D300	Pentax K-7	Sony A700

The Nikon D300S showed excellent color accuracy, as well as fairly accurate saturation levels. Hue accuracy was exceptionally good, with small hue shifts occurring in the reds, oranges and some greens and purples. The larger shifts in aqua and cyan are very common among the cameras we test; we think they’re an effort to produce sky colors that look better on monitors and in print. Average “delta-C” color error was only 4.6 after correction for saturation, which is excellent. (Delta-C is the same as the more commonly referred to delta-E, but delta-C takes into account only color differences, ignoring luminance variation.) Average saturation was 110.6% (10.6% oversaturated), a bit more vibrant than some semi-pro SLRs, but still very good. Mouse over the links below the illustration above to compare results with competing models.

Adobe RGB Accuracy Comparison
Nikon D300S	Canon 7D	Nikon D300	Pentax K-7	Sony A700

Like most other cameras, the Nikon D300S delivers more highly saturated colors when using the Adobe RGB color space (which provides a much wider gamut, or range of colors than can be expressed in sRGB). Average saturation was 117.1%, which is higher than the sRGB results, but saturation is about all that changed: Average saturation-corrected hue error was 4.88 “delta-C” units, slightly less accurate than the sRGB result, but still very good. Again, mouse over the links below the illustration above to compare results with other semi-pro APS-C SLRs.

This image shows how the Nikon D300S actually rendered the colors of the MacBeth chart, compared to a numerically ideal treatment. In each color swatch, the outer perimeter shows the color as actually captured by the camera. The inner square shows what the ideal color would look like if the brightness were adjusted to match the camera’s tone curve, while the small rectangle shows the numerically correct color with no adjustment. This image shows the very good hue accuracy of the D300S, as well as a the commonly-employed trick of overexposing some of the highest-saturation swatches, to give an impression of “brighter” color, without actually oversaturating.

The bottom row of the chart shows exaggerated white balance errors, revealing that the camera produced a slightly cool color balance when using Custom white balance, with a WhiBal card as the reference. White balance is actually pretty close for midtone through highlight values (note that the examples above deliberately exaggerate the white balance error). It’s somewhat worse in the shadows, but is also less visually apparent there.

There’s a lot in this particular graph, a lot more than we have room to go into here.

In comparing these graphs with those from competing cameras, we’ve found that the Noise Spectrum graph at lower right is the most important in terms of how the noise appears visually and how much effect a given amount of noise has on the image. Cameras that manage to shift their noise spectrum to higher frequencies have much finer-grained noise structures, making their noise less visually objectionable. In the graph above, this would show up as a noise spectrum curve that remained higher on the right side, representing higher noise frequencies. The total amount of noise is also obviously relevant, so we do look at the graphs in the lower left and upper right, but the noise spectrum has the most impact on how visually objectionable noise will appear.

ISO 100 is treated as a “LO” extension of the normal ISO range for the D300S, and that perhaps shows up here in that there’s a lot of low-frequency energy in the red and blue channels. Overall noise levels (the upper right and lower left plots) are slightly lower than at ISO 200, though, as one would expect. Below is the plot for ISO 200.

Here’s the same set of noise data at ISO 200, the D300S’ native ISO. The differences between it and the earlier D300 are relatively minor. The D300S does a pretty good job at keeping luminance noise (indicated by the black line) at higher frequencies, resulting in a very fine noise “grain” at low ISOs. Like many cameras these days, the red and blue channels have significantly higher noise levels at lower frequencies. That said, the overall noise levels here are so low that noise is all but invisible except when pixel peeping at deeper mid-tones and shadows, where it is visible, but still quite low.

Here’s the same set of noise data at ISO 3,200. Here, the Noise Spectrum graph is shifted towards the left-hand, lower-frequency side than it was at ISO 100 and 200. This indicates a coarsening of the “grain” of the image noise patterns by quite a bit, and indeed that’s what we see when inspecting the D300S’ ISO 3,200 images. The red and blue channels’ noise spectrum follows that of the luminance and green channels much more closely, a result of the default high ISO noise reduction applied, but is still higher at very low frequencies. This can be seen in high ISO images as large but subtle blotches of chroma noise, spread across multiple pixels. Overall, though, the D300S does a better job at holding a tight grain pattern than most competitors.

Total noise levels at ISO 3,200 are best described as “competitive,” with the D300S performing in the same ballpark as the Canon T1i, 50D or 7D, but somewhat better than the Pentax K-7. It does better than the Canons from midtones down through the lighter shadows, but the Canons edge it in the very darkest shadow areas.

Here’s the same set of noise data at ISO 6,400. The Noise Spectrum graph has shifted even further to the left, and the D300S’ default noise reduction has further reduced the chroma noise to more closely follow luminance noise. Notice also that the total noise levels are much higher. (Particularly evident in the pixel noise plot in the upper right corner of the illustration, and in the midtones and below in the graph in the lower left hand corner.)

This chart compares the Nikon D300S’ luminance noise performance at midtone grey density over a range of ISOs against that of other current, semi-pro SLR models. While we continue to show noise plots of this sort because readers ask for them, we each time point out that the noise magnitude is only a small part of the story, the grain pattern being much more important. Here, we can see that the Nikon D300S’ luminance noise magnitude follows that of its predecessor, the D300, extremely closely (the values are almost identical), while remaining lower than most of the competition for all ISOs except 6,400, where it exceeds that of the Sony A700. It’s interesting to note that D300S’ noise magnitude is lower at ISO 800 than at ISO 400, the result of fairly aggressive default high ISO noise reduction kicking in at that point. (Keep in mind these are at default noise reduction settings, so the shape of the curve can be influenced by the noise-reduction settings you employ. The Nikon D300S offers 4 levels of high ISO noise-reduction to choose from.)

 

Nikon D300S Dynamic Range Analysis

A key parameter in a digital camera is its Dynamic Range, the range of brightness that can be faithfully recorded. At the upper end of the tonal scale, dynamic range is dictated by the point at which the RGB data “saturates” at values of 255, 255, 255. At the lower end of the tonal scale, dynamic range is determined by the point at which there ceases to be any useful difference between adjacent tonal steps. Note the use of the qualifier “useful” in there: While it’s tempting to evaluate dynamic range as the maximum number of tonal steps that can be discerned at all, that measure of dynamic range has very little relevance to real-world photography. What we care about as photographers is how much detail we can pull out of the shadows before image noise becomes too objectionable. This, of course, is a very subjective matter, and will vary with the application and even the subject matter in question. (Noise will be much more visible in subjects with large areas of flat tints and subtle shading than it would in subjects with strong, highly contrasting surface texture.)

What makes most sense then, is to specify useful dynamic range in terms of the point at which image noise reaches some agreed-upon threshold. To this end, Imatest computes a number of different dynamic range measurements, based on a variety of image noise thresholds. The noise thresholds are specified in terms of f-stops of equivalent luminance variation in the final image file, and dynamic range is computed for noise thresholds of 1.0 (low image quality), 0.5 (medium image quality), 0.25 (medium-high image quality) and 0.1 (high image quality). For most photographers and most applications, the noise thresholds of 0.5 and 0.25 f-stops are probably the most relevant to the production of acceptable-quality finished images, but many noise-sensitive shooters will insist on the 0.1 f-stop limit for their most critical work.

The graphic below shows the test results from Imatest for an in-camera JPEG file from the Nikon D300S with a nominally-exposed density step target (Stouffer 4110), and the D300S’ contrast and other exposure-related settings at their default values.

Here, we can see that the tone curve shows excellent gradation in the highlights, but the shadow end trails off very abruptly. This can be seen when closely inspecting shots captured by the D300S, where detail is held very nicely in strong highlights, but somewhat less so in the deepest shadows. Total dynamic range reported is 9.02 f-stops while dynamic range at the highest quality level is 7.49 f-stops. The D300S does a good enough job of controlling noise in the shadows that the image quality never drops below the Medium-High level before the camera runs out of dynamic range altogether. Its dynamic range at the Medium-High and lower quality levels is thus the same as its total dynamic range of 9.02 stops. The D300’s score at highest quality is very similar to those other current top-end sub-frame SLRs. Its range at the Medium-High quality level is better than most, while its total (maximum) dynamic range is noticeably lower.

Note that this test was done with Active D-Lighting disabled by default, and we didn’t test the other Active D-Lighting settings as we found it made little difference to the Imatest scores. In fact, such schemes often lower the score at the highest quality level because the brightness boost in shadow areas also increase the noise.

Processing the Nikon D300S’ RAW (.NEF) files through Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) version 5.5 increased dynamic range by 1.4 f-stops at the highest quality level (8.89 f-stops), compared to the in-camera JPEG (7.49 f-stops), while total dynamic range reported increased by about 2.5 f-stops from 9.02 to 11.5. These results were obtained by using ACR’s automatic settings; then manually tweaking from there, so slightly better results may be possible. It’s worth noting here that ACR’s default noise reduction settings reduced overall noise (see the plot in the lower left-hand corner) relative to the levels in the in-camera JPEG, which would tend to boost the dynamic range numbers for the high quality threshold. Also, the extreme highlight recovery being performed by ACR here would likely produce color errors in strong highlights of natural subjects.

Dynamic Range, the bottom line:

The net result was that the Nikon D300S’ JPEGs scored about average in Imatest’s dynamic range analysis when compared against other current APS-C sensor models. Nikon D300S RAW files converted with ACR did much better, scoring in the top 10 cameras we’ve tested to date.

To get some perspective, here’s a summary of the Nikon D300S’ dynamic range performance, and how it compares to other digital SLRs that we also have Imatest dynamic range data for. (Results are arranged in order of decreasing dynamic range at the “High” quality level.):

Comparing the Nikon D300S to the rest of the field, its dynamic range in camera-produced JPEGs is about in line with competing models. Adobe Camera Raw managed to boost the DR pretty significantly, but as noted above, the extreme processing it’s applying in the highlights would almost certainly result in color errors in strong highlights in highly-colored natural subjects; the actual dynamic range of the sensor is likely somewhere in between.

Nikon D300S Resolution Chart Test Results

The chart above shows consolidated results from spatial frequency response measurements in both the horizontal and vertical axes. The “MTF 50” numbers tend to correlate best with visual perceptions of sharpness, so those are what we focus on here. The uncorrected resolution figures are 1,519 line widths per picture height in the horizontal direction (corresponding to the vertically-oriented edge), and 1,576 lines along the vertical axis (corresponding to the horizontally-oriented edge), for a combined average of 1,547 LW/PH. Correcting to a “standardized” sharpening with a one-pixel radius changed the resolution score by quite a bit, for an average of 2,346 LW/PH. The corrected numbers are quite good for a 12-megapixel APS-C SLR, and very similar to the results we got for the Nikon D300 (2,450 LW/PH).

To see what’s going on, refer to the plots below, which show the actual edge profiles for both horizontal and vertical edges, in both their original and corrected forms. Here, you can see that a very conservative amount of in-camera sharpening is applied in the horizontal direction (undersharpened by 23%), while in the vertical direction, Imatest reports undersharpening of 21.9%. This is why standardized sharpening improved the D300S’ MTF 50 numbers by so much. The conservative in-camera sharpening means that camera-produced JPEGs will take unsharp masking in Photoshop or other image-editing software better than most.

These are very good results. Still, (as is almost always the case), you’ll extract the most detail from the Nikon D300S’ images by careful processing of its NEF RAW files.

Nikon D300S High ISO RAW Image Quality

We’ve recently started looking at RAW files converted with dcraw, an excellent freeware raw converter. dcraw usually offers timely support for the latest cameras, but more importantly, it does not apply any noise-reduction, sharpening or other corrections such as geometric distortion correction to the output files. (We found that Adobe Camera Raw still applies some limited noise-reduction when its NR settings are set to zero, and it also applies other corrections depending on the make and model of the camera). There will always be differences between RAW converters, in terms of the sort of demosaicing algorithms they use (the processes by which they convert the separate Red, Green, and Blue data sets to an array of full-color RGB pixels), but dcraw seems to use a fairly generic algorithm that delivers good sharpness with relatively few artifacts, and can be counted on to not apply any noise reduction if you don’t want it to.

Below are crops from Nikon D300S high ISO RAW files compared to RAW files from the Nikon D300, Canon 50D, Canon 7D, and Pentax K-7, converted with dcraw.

High ISO Image Quality Nikon D300S vs Canon 50D, Canon 7D, Pentax K-7 RAW Comparison RAW files converted with dcraw, no NR, no sharpening Simulated Daylight
	Nikon D300S	Canon 50D	Canon 7D	Pentax K-7
I S O 8 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Canon 50D	Canon 7D	Pentax K-7
I S 0 1 6 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Canon 50D	Canon 7D	Pentax K-7
I S O 3 2 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Canon 50D	Canon 7D	Pentax K-7
I S 0 6 4 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Canon 50D	Canon 7D	Pentax K-7
I S 0 1 2 8 0 0	N/A ISO 12800 not supported			N/A ISO 12800 not supported
	N/A ISO 12800 not supported			N/A ISO 12800 not supported
	N/A ISO 12800 not supported			N/A ISO 12800 not supported

It’s actually uprising to see how similar these cameras perform in terms of high ISO RAW file noise. The D300S compares favorably to the others in this group, though at 12.3 megapixels, it has the lowest megapixel count. (The Canon 50D has 15.1 megapixels, the 7D has 18 megapixels and the Pentax K-7 has 14.6 megapixels.) That should give the D300S an edge in terms of noise, but that isn’t the case. Competing models are achieving similar levels of noise, despite having smaller photosites.

For Nikon shooters thinking of upgrading from the D300, or stepping up from the D90 or D5000, we’ve included crops comparing those cameras below.

High ISO Image Quality Nikon D300S vs Nikon D300, D90 and D5000 RAW Comparison RAW files converted with dcraw, no NR, no sharpening Simulated Daylight
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Nikon D90	Nikon D5000
I S O 8 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Nikon D90	Nikon D5000
I S 0 1 6 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Nikon D90	Nikon D5000
I S O 3 2 0 0
	Nikon D300S	Nikon D300	Nikon D90	Nikon D5000
I S 0 6 4 0 0

Very similar results here, though we’d say the D90 and D5000 have a slight edge in high ISO noise performance over the D300S.

Nikon D300S Modes and Menus

Nikon D300S Exposure Modes

The Nikon D300S has a mode button, rather than a mode dial. The current exposure mode is displayed on the LCD and in the viewfinder, and can be changed by pressing this button and rotating the main (rear) command dial. Available exposure modes are: P (Programmed Auto), S (Shutter Priority), A (Aperture Priority) or M (Manual). Like all pro and semi-pro Nikons, the D300S doesn’t offer any scene modes.

Programmed Auto: Lets the camera control the shutter speed and aperture settings, although you can vary its choices by turning the Command dial. That is, you can increase or decrease the aperture the camera has chosen, and the camera will vary the shutter speed to maintain the same overall exposure value. Once you’ve chosen an offset in the aperture/shutter combination, the camera will continue to control the exposure automatically, while maintaining the aperture/shutter bias you’ve selected. This ability to select a persistent bias for the exposure system is very useful, in many cases more so than conventional Aperture or Shutter Priority metering (see below). This is because the “tweaked” Program AE will track even radical changes in subject lighting, not being constrained to a single aperture or shutter speed.

Aperture Priority: Allows you to set the aperture value while the camera automatically selects the appropriate shutter speed. Available apertures will vary with the lens in use.

Shutter Speed Priority: Allows you to set the shutter speed value while the camera automatically selects the appropriate aperture. Shutter speeds range from 1/8,000 to 30 seconds in this mode.

Manual: Lets you select both the aperture value and shutter speed, and increases the shutter speed range to include a Bulb setting (shutter remains open as long as the shutter button is depressed) for exposures longer than 30 seconds.

Nikon D300S Menus

Pressing the Menu button provides access to the camera’s full menu system. The D300S’s menus are arranged in a vertical tab structure, with icons for each tab along the left side. The multi-selector is used to navigate the menus.

The Nikon D300S’ Retouch Menu lets you modify images in-camera. NOTE that it always saves the results as a new image, so your original images are preserved.