V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 107
Buffer Sizes
The remaining buffer is always shown by the
r
indicator
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while shooting, so it is always easy to see where you stand in
terms of remaining memory. But a number of options impact
buffer size. Here’s what my D300 says is available at my
usual camera settings:
Normal High
ISO
NR Long exp NR
NEF+JPEG
14
14
8
NEF
15
15
9
JPEG Fine L
26
26
20
These numbers differ from what Nikon says in their manual
(p. 402; though the footnote does say figures are
approximate). The reason has to do with buffer efficiency.
The D300 never reports more than 46 images available in the
buffer, but if you set up the camera to shoot a series of images
in Continuous High shooting method, you’ll note that,
especially for the JPEG sizes, the buffer remaining indicator
doesn’t seem to count down with each image you shoot. After
shooting 10 images continuously, for example, my buffer
remaining count had only dropped by 6 images.
Thus, the camera reports the actual number of images that it
can still
store
, while the manual reports the number of images
that you can
shoot
before the buffer hits zero. If you’ve got a
fast UDMA type of card in the camera, the camera will be
storing images almost—but not quite—as fast as it can process
them for JPEGs. Indeed, as you get to the smaller JPEG sizes
and lower quality (which produce smaller files) you can
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Both the top LCD and the viewfinder Shots Remaining indicator switch to a Shots
Remaining in Buffer indicator when the shutter release is pressed partway, and a
small
r
is used in front of the number to indicate this. What you don’t want to see is
r0
, which means that the buffer is full.
