D300 ISO performance ...wow!

Following on from my earlier post, I have now used my new D300 for a wedding shoot and was very impressed!

As I had hoped, it's performance at high ISOs (1600+) was excellent and infinitely better than my D200. During the ceremony for example which was held in a very nice, but relatively dark, converted barn, I was able to shoot handheld using my 50mm 1.4 without having to worry about noise at all.

In fact the levels of noise, even at ISO 1600, were so low that I didn't even need to run the images through noise reduction software afterwards, which is obviously a big bonus in terms of workflow.

Providing the couple are happy for me to do so I will post some example images from the ceremony shortly.

The larger screen on the back of the camera is also great and, due to the extent that you can zoom in when reviewing shots, makes it easy to tell if images are sharp and well focused.

The other big bonus was in battery life. Although I had a spare I didn't need to change the battery once and was using the camera for 7-8 hours in total.

My only slight bugbear is that Nikon has again decided to very slightly change the positioning of some of the most commonly used controls on the D300 when compared to the D200. For example, the buttons and technique used to zoom in and out of an image in the preview screen is slightly different to the D200. Not a big problem at all but quite frustrating when you are used to doing these things automatically without thinking. As I use both cameras at the same time, and the bodies are almost identical, it would be much simpler if the basic controls were the same. For those of us that use two cameras at the same time, perhaps this is Nikon's way of making you buy two new bodies rather than just one!!

All in all though I was extremely impressed. The Nikon D300 truly is a great camera.