Sungkai Fiesta @Orchid Garden Hotel - 27 Sept

D New D300 & D3!!! Ooouch...

The Nikon D3 is a landmark also introduced on August 23, 2007.
The D3 is Nikon's first full-frame DSLR to mimic the old 35mm film format, and surprise number one is that it can crank at 9 FPS. Surprise number two is that it's the same price as the D2Xs.

Formats
Nikon calls the old 35mm film frame format "FX," a brilliantly terse and more accurate way to say "full frame," since "full-frame" always varied with what format of film camera you shot. The FX sensor is 23.9 x 36.0mm. The crop factor is 1.00.

The D3 can shoot in three formats. The Nikon D3 also does traditional DX (1.5 crop factor), as well as 4:5 cropped from full frame (24 x 30mm) formats. DX is the traditional format used by every other Nikon DSLR.
The Nikon D3 automatically recognizes DX lenses, masks the finder, and uses the central DX portion of the D3's sensor. Likewise, the D3 masks the finder in 4:5 mode.

The DX mode of the D3 uses only the middle part of the full-frame sensor, equivalent to the same sensor size use by every other Nikon digital camera. Gone are the puny cropped modes of the D2Xs: the cropped DX mode of the D3 simply is the standard Nikon digital size instead of full-frame. The D3 is 12 MP in FX (full-frame) mode. It's only 5MP in DX mode, but in DX (cropped) mode it can smoke at 11 FPS if you don't need metering or autofocus from frame-to-frame. Everything works at 9FPS.

The Nikon D300 was announced August 23rd 2007.
The D300 is a 12MP DX (1.5x crop factor), 6 FPS (8 FPS with grip), 3" LCD DSLR.

The D300 is a nice evolution from theNikon D200, but it's not revolutionary as the D200 was in 2005. The equally new Nikon D3 is revolutionary: full-frame 9 FPS for the same price as the D2Xs.

If you want a new Nikon DSLR for about US$1,800, just order a D300. If you already have a D200, I wouldn't go out of my way to dump it for the D300 unless one of the D300's new features, like live-viewing on the exquisite new LCD, faster frame rates, or possibly broader range of color adjustments, are critical to you.
The D300 is 110% compatible with the Nikon system, since it also works great with old manual-focus AI film lenses. The D300 works with everything you already own; nothing is made obsolete by the D300 that hasn't already been obsolesced by the D70 back in 2003.

More on http://www.kenrockwell.com/