Nikon D300S

Handling (8.00)

This is not a camera to be taken lightly, in any sense of the word. The D300S weighs in at nearly two pounds (30 oz./840g) for the body alone. The 16-85mm lens we used for testing adds another pound — this is not a camera you’ll tote around unless you’re heading out to shoot some pictures. As for maneuverability, the right hand grip has a very effective non-slip covering, and a substantial bump (the trademark red highlight) which rests securely against your middle finger. The back thumb rest is deeper than most, designed for the side rather than the ball of your thumb, and also well textured; together, they enable a very solid grip. We could have used a fraction of an inch more depth in the grip, but that’s personal preference (and large hands) rather than a design flaw.

Buttons & Dials (9.75)

The control scheme has familiarity as an advantage, since it’s been essentially unchanged since the Nikon D200, announced in 2005, and it’s easy enough to use once you get the hang of it. Two control dials, mounted front and back, make settings adjustments fast, when you’ve memorized which dial does what. There does seem to be a perverse pride in the obscurity of certain commands, though. Want to set a manual white balance? You have to hold down the WB button on top of the camera until ‘Pre’ blinks in the control panel, then take your settings shot.

Essentially, you have to pay your dues in climbing the learning curve before being admitted to the club. And even then, we find the multi selector button on the right a pain to use. It’s small and has to move quite far to have any effect.

The back, top and side controls are shown here. On the front of the camera are the sub-command dial, located on the right hand grip, along with the depth of field preview button and programmable Fn button to the left of the lens. The Fn button is used to set bracketing increments, and can be assigned to a variety of AE, metering, image quality and command functions, with and without dial adjustments.

Display(s) (10.10)

The D300S uses Nikon’s 3-inch 921,000-dot LCD, a good-looking display which can be read easily even when the camera’s held at extreme angles. The brightness can be adjusted to one of seven levels, with a useful on-screen greyscale chart displayed while making the adjustment.

The camera comes with a clear plastic snap-on cover to protect the LCD. Maybe we’re paranoid, but we generally left this cover in place when shooting outdoors, since it has minimal impact on visibility.

Pressing the INFO button while shooting brings up the LCD info display, which provides an in-depth display of current shooting settings at glance. Pressing INFO again turns the bottom two lines into an interactive quick menu.

Secondary Display

As you’d expect from an advanced SLR, there’s a monochrome LCD control panel on top of the camera that displays current shooting settings, particularly useful when working with a tripod. The screen includes shooting mode, shutter speed and aperture, image size, format and compression, focus point, white balance setting, remaining shots and battery level. The display illuminates for six seconds when the power switch is turned all the way to the right.

Viewfinder (9.75)

The excellent viewfinder, held over from the D300, is an eye-level pentaprism with approximately 100% coverage and 0.94% magnification. Even when wearing eyeglasses, the viewfinder is comfortable and the information display is easy to read; nothing tucked into the lower corners where you have to shift the camera around to read it. The diopter control, mounted flat against the back of camera, offers -2 to +1 m-1 adjustment flexibility and, while it’s easy enough to move when needed, it’s unlikely to be shifted accidentally.

There’s an optional viewfinder grid overlay available via the custom settings menu. The lines are unobtrusive, and useful for aligning with horizontals or verticals along the edges of a shot, though the pattern leaves the central area entirely open, which limits the practical advantages.

Image Stabilization (9.77)

The VR lens offered a substantial improvement in a key category of our image stabilization testing: compensating for the kind of typical low-intensity horizontal movement encountered in handheld shooting, and this effect holds true at every tested shutter speed. When the camera was moved vertically, though, the VR effect was negligible, and when the level of shake was intense, the system produced lower-resolution results at faster shutter speeds.

We test image stabilization by mounting the camera in a custom computer-controlled rig that produces consistent movement patterns, and shoot at two different levels of shake, with and without the image stabilization system. By comparing the two sets of results, we can analyze the effect of IS on image resolution. More on how we test image stabilization.

At the low shake setting, the VR lens offered a major sharpness boost when the camera was moving horizontally, though it proved ineffective against vertical shake.

Here again, vertical shake was basically unaffected by the VR system. Against aggressive horizontal shake, though, the camera did better with the VR system turned off at shutter speeds above 1/60 second.

The Canon 7D produced a smaller improvement against low-intensity horizontal shake than the Nikon D300S, but the IS system was more effective overall in providing some enhancement under all shooting conditions, producing a higher score.

The following same-size crops offer a visual indication of the variation when found when shooting across the range of shutter speeds, with the camera moving horizontally.

Image Stabilization Comparison Table			Expand
	Low Shake IS Off	Low Shake IS On	High Shake IS Off	High Shake IS On
1/500
1/250
1/125
1/60
1/30
1/15
1/8