Here’s an interesting tidbit which you’re almost guaranteed to forget the first time you read it. I’ll just be out with it up front: enabling Active D-Lighting on a D300 reduces the number of shots the buffer can hold–even if you’re just shooting raw (recall that a NEF file has a full-size JPG preview in it). With quality/compression settings at NEF, Lossless Compressed, 12-bit the buffer shrinks from 18 to 12 shots.
The reason you’re likely to forget it is this: who ever actually fires off a buffer’s worth of shots in continuous shooting (6fps on CH, Continuous High)? I’m one of those strange birds that always leaves my camera set to CH. Because the D300 has a hair trigger, that means I take two shots every time I press the shutter button. It also means I have somewhere around 26,000 photos stored and backed up (that’s another somewhat ridiculous topic for a future ridiculous post).
At the airshow Jon and I were shooting away at these F-16s and F-18s screaming overhead and he was consistently getting more shots in a row than me. On the trainride home we compared settings and narrowed it down to the Active D-Lighting. Really?! I have to admit to feeling a little betrayed, but whatever and lesson learned. It’s not like I didn’t take 2,500 photos anyway. And fill up 20gb of CF cards.
Active D-what? Buff-what?
#1 by Jason on June 19th, 2009
Were you using the same speed cards? I’m skeptical. The lighting could take more processing but more buffer space. Maybe they read from one write to another and it halves the buffer
#2 by Spencer on June 20th, 2009
It’s sad but true. Check out the D300 manual pages 166 and 405-6. Evidently it takes more time to record the images b/c of the extra processing for Active D-Lighting. On both our cameras the buffer registered the same amount of shots with and without ADL, so I doubt CF speed had an impact.