From the moment I saw the first reviews of the D300 I knew it was the camera I had been waiting for. The price point initially made it hard for me to justify replacing my trusty D80 as there was nothing wrong with it and it was still serving me well, but the horde of additional features and improvements of the D300 led me to eventually take the plunge and order one. Since then my D300 has well and truly validated it’s cost for me and then some, I could easily write several pages about the various features of the D300 so in the interests of not going too overboard I’ll concentrate on some of the features which to me stand out as most important and ones I most value in upgrading from my old D80.

For a start this is one solid and well designed piece of kit, the whole thing feels very rugged and the layout of the controls is very intuative, all the important controls that I (and I suspect most people) need to change most often such are easily accessible and take mere seconds to adjust as required. The menu system is also very clear and well laid out, with a huge number of customisations and settings at your disposal (most of which I never touch but they are there for the person who wants to have control of every setting) and even the ability to have a series of presets if you wish.

The AF system is one standout point for me, I have my camera in continuous focus mode at all times as I mostly work with animals, and I have yet to be disappointed with the accuracy and speed of the D300′s focusing ability. Additionally, having 51 AF points with an 4 way control pad easily accessible under the thumb to move the active point without having to take your eye from the viewfinder makes framing the shot as you want it simple and easy.

The high ISO performance of the D300 is another point very worthy of note, with my D80 I didn’t like taking the ISO much above 400 if I could help it as noise started to creep in at a noticable level, however with my D300, 400 is my default setting. The noise is virtually undetectable at that level so unless I am shooting in exceptionally bright conditions where I can consostently still get high shutter speeds at lower ISO settings, I default to 400 all the time, and if the light does fade I don’t shy away from using higher ISOs. 800 still gives me pictures with barely detectable noise short of heavy cropping and I will happily bump the ISO up to 1600 to maintain higher shutter speeds without worrying too much about noise levels, as even that high, as long as photos aren’t cropped too heavily the noise is controlled so well it doesn’t really notice. It is only really if you start to creep towards ISO 3200 in low light conditions that the noise becomes a problem, and I have even taken a photo in good outdoor lighting at ISO 3200 by accident (I forgot to drop it back down to 400 after coming out of a room with very low light) and if I hadn’t looked at the exif data I’d have thought I had taken it at ISO 400! At time of writing the ISO performance of the D300 has been matched and in some cases excelled by it’s competitors and successors, but even today, the D300 (or more accurately it’s successor the D300s) has very competative high ISO performance for it’s price point

The shooting speed of the D300 is another thing I have found to be rather useful, although I always try and emphasise getting the right shot over shooting away and hoping for the best, I still find there are times when taking a sequence of shots of an action moment is helpful in the interest of making sure you don’t miss that critical moment. For this the D300 is excellent, giving a 6fps fire rate out of the box with the option to upgrade this to 8fps if you have the optional battery grip attached with rechargable AAs or the adapter to allow you to use the same batteries the D3 uses. I currently use batteries from the D3 series in my battery grip to get the full 8fps speed, however I always previously I found the 6fps more than adequate, certainly a vast and appreciated improvement over the 2-3fps speed I had with my D80 and I tend to favour this shooting mode whenever I am taking action shots. The buffer is also very good on the D300, I never normally take more than a handful of photos at a time but I have tested and managed a good few seconds of shooting at 6fps before it slowed down.

On top of all this I think it also goes without saying that the overall image quality you get from the D300 is simply fantastic, the Nikon exposure system is superb, the colour and contrast reproduction is excellent and even these can be customised in camera if you wish with several colour presets and an option to fully customise colour saturation, contrast and sharpness.

As stated before, there is plenty more I could talk about with the D300 but for me the most standout features, it’s build quality, ease of use, customisation, flawless AF system, high ISO performance and high shooting speed, really revolutionised my photography and are the main features which for me make the D300 worth every penny I spent on it and the reasons it continues to bring a smile to my face every time I use it.

Really the only flaw I could possibly come up with is the simple fact that at over £1000 I suspect that most casual photographers would struggle to justify the cost, but for anybody who wants to take their photography seriously without going as far as true pro level DSLRs, unles you really avidly want a full frame sensor camera (which quite frankily if you did I don’t know why you’d be looking at anything less than a pro level camera) I can’t see how any photographer could want more than the D300 has to offer.