Nikon D300S

Buttons & Dials

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.

Picture Controls

The Nikon Picture Control system is used here, which combines sharpening, contrast, brightness, saturation and hue settings. Unlike most Nikons, the D300S comes with only four Picture Control presets, though you can load existing Picture Controls from other cameras, or create your own. The supplied presets are listed below, with sample images. The descriptions are straight from the Nikon manual.

Each Picture Control can be adjusted using the following parameters:

Quick Adjust	Reduce or enhance the effects of the selected Picture Control, in a range of ±2. Not available for neutral, monochrome or custom controls.
Sharpening	Choose A for auto adjustment based on scene recognition, or manually set from 0 to 9.
Contrast	Choose A for auto adjustment based on scene recognition, or manually set from -3 to +3. Not available if Active D-Lighting is on.
Brightness	Set to -1 or +1. Not available if Active D-Lighting is on.
Saturation	Choose A for auto adjustment based on scene recognition, or manually set from -3 to +3. Not available for monochrome.
Hue	Set from -3 to +3, Negative values make reds more purple, blues more green, and greens more yellow; positive values make reds more orange, greens more blue, and blues more purple. Not available for monochrome.
Filter Effects	In monochrome, simulates effects of yellow, orange, red and green filters in black and white photography.
Toning	In monochrome, tints photos sepia, cyanotype, red, yellow, green, blue green, blue, purple blue or red blue.

After adjusting a Picture Control to your liking, you can save it as a custom Picture Control, with nine available slots available and with the option to give your custom control a meaningful name. Your creation will be listed right after the presets in the menu, so there’s no hunting required. Picture Controls can also be created using provided software, or downloaded from the Internet, then copied onto a memory card for use on the D300s.

In-camera multiple exposures can be created with from two to ten exposures. The camera can control the gain, based on the number of exposures selected, or it can be set manually.

Picture Effect Samples
Standard Neutral Vivid Monochrome More...

In-Camera Editing

Nikon offers an extensive and useful array of editing options. The D-lighting settings, similar to the Active D-Lighting available while shooting, enhances the exposure in shadowed areas, with three available settings. Virtual skylight and warming filters can be applied to an image, and a photo can be converted to black and white, sepia or cyanotype (blue and white). Color balance can be adjusted, on a screen with RGB histograms displayed, along the green-magenta and blue-amber axes.

In-camera RAW image processing is available, with adjustments for image quality and size, white balance, exposure compensation, Picture Control setting, high ISO noise reduction and color space. Multiple exposure composites can be created by combining two RAW images. with control over the gain of each image but not the positioning.

Also available are red-eye correction, cropping and resizing.

Videos can be trimmed in-camera by selecting the beginning and end points. The result is saved as a separate clip, leaving the original intact. Considering how easy it is to jerk the camera when starting or stopping video recording, this is a very welcome capability.

Menu

The D300s offers a quick menu system, like many digital SLRs, but it’s an oddball implementation. Pressing the INFO button once while shooting brings up a settings display. Pressing INFO again lets you change ten of these settings, but they’re not the frequently used options we expect from a quick menu. Instead. you can choose a shooting menu and custom setting bank, turn High ISO and long exposure noise reduction on or off, set Active D-Lighting and color space, assign the preview, Fn and AE-L/AF-L button functions, and choose a Picture Control setting.

The main menu system follows the familiar Nikon organizational structure, with tabbed sections on the left, in gray, and white text on a black background for the individual menu items on the right, The section menus can be long (the setup menu has 21 entries, for example), so it would be handy if the control wheels could be used to scroll through your options. No such luck: you’re stuck with the multi selector, which we found small and not especially responsive.

One nice touch when working through the menu system is the availability of on-screen help, by pressing the ? button.

Instruction Manual

Nikon does a nice job explaining a complex camera, beginning with a pocket-size 64-page Quick Guide that does a surprisingly good job covering not just initial camera setup, but some of the features whose functions aren’t instinctively obvious without a little help, such as using the dual memory card slots and assigning a task to the Fn button.

This is followed by a complete 400+ plus user manual (you can download a copy here) that is nicely organized, well written and comprehensive. As usual, we would like to see a more extensive, user-friendly index that covers concepts you might be searching for instead of simply words that appear in menus. If you want to explore your movie audio options, for example, you won’t find the relevant info indexed under audio, mono, stereo, movie, video, soundtrack or anything else that strikes us as instinctive. Still, overall, this is a well prepared piece of documentation, made more useful if you access the downloaded PDF (with its search capabilities) rather than the printed book.

As we’ve seen before, Nikon offers a useful online tutorial, including extensive video segments, explaining the camera features and their benefits. You will find it by clicking here.