V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 71
But suffice it to say that the sensor in the D300 has a fixed
range that it can capture while the situations you want to
photograph will present quite a variety of ranges you’ll need
to deal with. Don’t fret—the D300 has a plethora of
automated features to help you. But you’ll want to pay close
attention to exposure, and knowing what the sensor can
capture is part of getting exposure “right.” If you underexpose,
for example, you lower the range that the camera records (by
not using some of it at the high end). That’s akin to setting a
higher ISO value.
Fortunately, your D300 doesn’t have one exposure problem
that plagues film: reciprocity failure, or the tendency to
require a different-than-expected exposure at extremely short
or extremely long shutter speeds. If you can measure the light
in a scene, the D300 can be set for that directly, with no
compensations for short or long shutter speeds.
So what is the usable camera dynamic range of the D300? I
certainly don’t have any problems extracting eight clean stops
of data from my NEF images. When I’m working at the base
ISO level and getting my exposure perfectly aligned, I can
generally get another half stop.
Spectral Characteristics
The spectral characteristics of the D300 sensor are
unavailable. Unlike the D2h and some earlier Nikon DSLRs,
the D300 does not seem to have a near-infrared pollution
problem, which requires using a hot mirror filter to correct.
Indeed, the D300 seems to have intensely reduced reactions
to
all
light outside the visible spectrum. Both UV and near-
infrared response is lower on the D300 than it has been on
any previous Nikon DSLR I’ve tested (see “Infrared” on page
<687>), though not quite as low as the D3, which seems
nearly impervious to UV and IR light. The low UV response of
the D300 will have a minor impact on some purple values,
which live down in the high UV spectrum. Moreover, like
many digital cameras, the blue spectrum—UV lies just below
