New Camera - Nikon D300

I've acquired a new camera last week, the Nikon D300, stepping up from the already two years old Nikon D40. The first impression of the camera is that it is much more heavy than the D40, mostly because the D300's body is made of magnesium alloy, instead of the plastic that the D40 uses.

File size is also very "heavy". A 2GB card only holds 98 lossless-compressed 12-bit RAW images with 4,288 × 2,848 resolution. It will hold even less if you go crazy and shoot with uncompressed 14-bit RAW. However, this will not be a good option, continuous shooting rate drops to only 2.5 frames per second from 6 frames per second when shooting 14-bit RAW.

There are much more functions on the D300 when compare to the D40, which is obvious since the D300 is of a much higher class. I am still reading the manual, discovering new features. Accessing those features is much easier than on the D40. There are simply more buttons on the D300 for fine tuning how the camera perform, no need to go deep into the menu. This is not really a feature because all the high-end cameras have this layout, but one thing I don't understand is that why cheaper cameras can't adopt this layout, it's not that expensive to put more buttons on the body.

Sample Images: (click to enlarge)