I am very thrilled to write this blog post. On Saturday, Mar 11th, I bought a Nikon D300 at an RC Plane Convention. I accompanied my kid to this convention to check it out. And my wife slipped $200 to me and asked me to take care of any needs my kid would ask. For 90 minutes, we walked around all the trading desks, there was nothing interesting to buy. Then, at a corner, I found this Nikon DSLR sitting there. Since my kid had no interest in buying anything there. I took the chance and bought the camera. It turned out to be a great bargain.
The seller is asking for $125. Before I paid, I took the camera for some testing. It was not autofocusing, and the shutter was acting weird. The menu looks totally different from the camera I used before (like Nikon D40, Nikon D3100, and Nikon D5100). And there are so many knobs, wheels, and buttons on the camera body. I did a quick search for the camera online, the current price is $150 from reputable online stores. This one is $25 cheaper. It can either be a piece of crap or a hidden gem.
I remembered at one time, I was at an estate sale, and there was a Nikon D80. I saw it first and was hesitant for a few minutes, and it was taken by someone else. That guy was very excited about getting that D80. And this time, I didn't want to make the same mistake, so I paid and got the camera. To my surprise, a camera bag came with the purchase. In it, there were 4 more compact flash memory cards (of various sizes), And there were 4 more batteries and a charger with a power cord. There was also an attachable bottom part for an extra battery and a D300 strap. Even if this camera is crap, I was still getting a great deal.
After purchasing, my kid asked for lunch. As we sat down for the burgers and fries, I tried out the camera. As I suspected, the shutter issue was a misconfiguration. Although I don't know the camera well, I was able to get the shutter working as the way I expected. Just as I thought, the way camera misbehave must be a configuration issue. There was still a question of whether lens focusing works or not. The seller offered a Nikkor 16-80mm lens for $170. I wasn't interested since it was a bit too expensive. And sitting at the table eating lunch, there was no way for me to test if the camera's shutter focusing functionality is working or not because I don't have a lens. I wasn't too concerned about this. Nikon makes great cameras, they were built to last. If this camera is broken, it would be the shutter button that would break first. I tried the shutter many times while I was still there, it felt great.
That was not something that assured me about this purchase. My experience and knowledge of the Nikon camera was assuring me that I didn't make a bad purchase. I am no expert on Nikon cameras, but I know where to great answers online. After I got home, I spent a couple of hours doing research. I found out that the introductory price of this camera is almost $1800 in the year 2007. Today's price of this is less than 10% of the introductory price. This proves the fact that people buying a new camera at the initial full price is a stupid act. This Nikon D300 is not even a great camera. It has a DX format CMOS sensor, not an FX format sensor. All the DX AF-S lenses can be mounted to this camera. I had a D5100 with a AF-S 50 mm Nikkor lens. The D300 had no problem mounting the lens and taking pictures. After half an hour of messing around, I was able to correct the misconfiguration of the auto-focusing issue. There was a configuration in the auto-focus section that was set to "Off" instead of "On". After I flipped the value to "On" auto-focusing was working as I expected. Another issue that was bothering me was that the mirror would flip up and stay up until I click the shutter again. This was for shooting video and was a twist of one of the little knobs, I had to search online on how to do this. Once I got these two no-issues corrected, I was sure that the camera is working as expected.
More testing was done four days later. I had to order a card reader for compact flash disks, and a used Nikkor AF-S 18-55 mm lens just for this new camera. It cost me another $90. I also had to do some research on how to configure the camera for taking photos of objects, people, and scenes. This was done by manipulating the existing "Picture Controls", then saving as customized "Picture Controls". When I take the photos, I will select one of these customized "Picture Controls", then make the adjustments to aperture, shutter speed, and lens focus. Finally, I would take the shot. I created the "Picture Controls" based the recommendations from Ken Rockwell:
I set the "Active-D Lighting" to standard. It can be set higher for scenic and landscape shots. This is an important setting for all three "Picture Controls". It sets the color balance and contrast. For all three "Picture Controls", I set the sharpness to 5.
There are some other settings, like for lens focus, I set it to "Shutter/Auto-Focus". This allows me to press the shutter down half to do the lens focusing, then full press to take the photo. For long shut press, I set it to "CL" (continuous shooting, low setting). It allows me to press down the shutter and take at max 5 photos at one time. I choose the single point focusing instead of the matrix focusing. And for "White-Balance", I customize it for "Standard" and A3. This will add some orange to the final image.
Some other configurations:
It took a while for me to figure out all that. This camera is a bit more complicated than the D5100 I had, and there are a lot more knobs, buttons, and wheels. Right next to the shutter, there is a rudimentary LCD screen where I can quickly view the settings, and the on/off switch can be flipped to the right and light up the LCD screen. Most of the configuration changes can be done by pressing some buttons and rotating some wheels on the camera. They are convenient. But I never used something like this. It is quite some get-used to.
After I finished the configuration changes, I did some more testing. And found some issues. For one, there is a red hot pixel on the image sensor. This is pretty common. The hot pixel can be removed during post-processing. It is a bit annoying, and also adds extra work during processing. This hot pixel does not always show up. It is only seen when I crank up the "ISO" to a large value for dim light situations. This is one minor flaw of this old camera. It is expected since it is quite old. I tried the camera with the flashlight SB 600. It worked as expected. There was no surprise about it.
Another problem I found is that the image sensor is dirty. I had some sensor cleaning tools before. I picked a brush and tried to dust it off, I thought it was a hair or something. Turned out it was a smudge of some kind of oil. A simple dusting off just made it worse. Luckly I had some Pec-Pad non abrasive wipes. So I used one and wrapped around the butt of a pen and lightly wiped the image sensor, having most of the smudge off. Aother test showed there are two dots on the image sensor. I decided to leave it. There is a camera store nearby where I can have the image sensor cleaned, it costs $75. I checked the sensor myself, it looks clean. I set the sensor self clean-up to run automatically at shutdown time, and I cleaned the lens (the front and the back) using the Pec-Pad. later I checked again, the dots were no longer there. It is possible that the dots were on the lens and was removed by the cleaning or some minor dust on the sensor that has been shaken off by the automatic cleaning. This is great! It is also something that I expected, D300 used to be an expensive camera. The overall quality of the camera is good. By taking some effort to clean up, the camera will be a good item to have for a long time.
After all these evaluation, I found that I was not impressed by this camera. It is advanced when it was first came out. Now, it looks like an antique. The disk it uses is so big, I had to buy an extra disk reader for it. Also, if I don't make the changes in configuration it is impossible to take any good photos. All the customizations are necessary. I have some experience with Nikon cameras and this type of configuration changes are not a big deal to me. But for average users who had no idea what to do, such camera will eventually be a bad investment. I could imagine the person who bought this camera. He or she probably thought the more expensive this was, the more amazing the photos would turn out. It must have been a great disappointment for them when they tried the camera, and it turned out not as they expected.
To me the biggest disappointment is the fact that it is not an FX-format camera. When I first set sight of it, I really thought it was an FX-format camera. But after a quick search, I know it was just a DX-format camera. No wonder it was so cheap. Aside from this, the next disappointment is that the image quality is no better than the D5100 I had, even after all the configuration customization I have done. This camera surely is fading into history. Also, the size and weight of this thing are way more than the D5100 I had. This is another drawback. What is good is that everything works. The camera works surprisingly well under low-light conditions. The LCD has better details than cheaper cameras of the same level. This is a huge bonus. It is very helpful to me that I can preview the images, and get a sense of the qualities. Once I understand how things work, all the knobs, wheels, and buttons are great additions. I don't have to use the on-screen menu to make configuration changes. The big strap with the word D300 also presents a sense of prestige (haha). Overall, this camera is just a toy, a glorious used-to-be expensive toy. Half a year ago, I lost the drive of using a DSLR, now that I have this, I can feel the joy of taking photos again.
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