John Kung

This weekend I picked up a new Nikon D300s from European Cameras in Drummoyne, very exciting! I’ve been desperately wanting to play with video ever since the D90 came out, and after playing with the Canon 5d MkII’s video it has just made it worse. I’ll go into detail about the video function in the next post, for now I’ll stick to first impressions.

And first impressions is very good. Stills image quality is excellent, with pretty much the same dynamic range as my D700. The default settings seem to have a bit lower colour saturation than my D700, but that should be an easy fix once I delve into the camera’s image settings. Handing is also excellent, and in fact almost identical to the D700. It has the same autofocus system, all the buttons are 99% in the same place, and it even uses the same battery grip as the D700. This will make an excellent back up camera should anything happen to my main camera.

Video-wise, well, it is obvious Nikon does not prioritise video as highly as Canon. It only shoots 720p HD video rather than Canon’s 1080p HD video, and uses the archaic Motion JPG codec while Canon uses the modern AVCHD. In terms of pure visual quality the difference in resolution and codec doesn’t make for a massive difference in the real life video I’ve seen, but these are the kind of differences that will niggle at pros — if I were to shoot anything motion other than for my own edification I would pick the Canon any day.

The other big problem with capturing video on the D300s is that the interface is clunky. To shoot video you have to engage live view, but to make changes to the aperture you need to exit out of live view, make the change, then go back into live view. This is only one of the issues with the video capture usability, I won’t list them all here because they’re all pretty much the same as the problems with the D90, and tomes have been written about that.

Overall though it was an excellent purchase. Nikons have always excelled in usability (for still image capture at least!) and the D300s is excellent in that regard. It takes images 95% as good as more expensive full frame cameras, focuses and handles as well as its bigger brothers, and is a relative bargain compared to the $7000 D3s. Video has its niggles but it does work, and is a great bonus feature. Stay tuned for my next post that deals specifically with video.