Okay.. this may sound strange, but has anyone experience increased sharpness with some of their lenses on the D300 as opposed to their D200?
I have not had the oppurtunity to use my 70-200 vr until last weekend and noticed that it was surprisingly sharper wide open on the D300 than when I used it on my D200.
On the D200, I always thought my 80-200 AF-S was sharper than my 70-200 VR, but now I do not think so anymore with the D300..
And I have no messed with the fine adjustment either..
I don't think my 80-400 got sharper on the D300 coming from a D50 but it certainly focuses a lot faster and less hunting. Before I almost couldn't use AF, but on the D300 it's usable. That's just my experience.
I can't help but wonder what adjustments have been made to pixel lenses and adjustments as to how the light from the back element to the sensor have been tweaked, which is very much going to effect things like lens edge resolutions etc. I would be willing to bet since the D200 and the switch over the CMOS this has been somewhat altered........just not mentioned in anything short of a engineering white paper probably not even available to us from Nikon.........just the auto CA removal in the Jpeg engine is a marvel........and much appreciated..........
The D200 got knocked a lot for seeming soft, although it just needed some sharpening and responded well to it. My theory is Nikon didn't want the camera perceived the same way this time around. I wind up turning the sharpening to 0 in Capture NX and the images are often just right as is.
Everything is sharper with the D300 over the D200 - - I'm not pushing the sharpness at all in NX with the D300. Sometimes it almost feels too sharp. In another forum someone used the D300 with the 200-400VR & posted a bird shot. Someone went in & complained it was over sharpened. Not so - just the new sharper look....
Hmmmmm... I add a fair amount of sharpening with my D300 for sports. Right now for hockey I'm using +6... but that allows me to keep my USM in post down. I can't say it's significantly sharper than the D200 in neutral settings, maybe a bit... but possibly down to the resolution increase. Of course, most of that shooting is at ISO1600 and higher, so maybe I need to spend more time at ISO's lower than that to say with full conviction...
I processed my first D300 shot yesterday, and noticed that from Raw, the image is quite a bit sharper than the D200. My usual workflow in PS required a reduction in the opacity of the sharpening layers by about 1/2 compared to the D200.
Of course this may change with another image, but this is my first observation.
No.. it was focusing right.. the images are not "unsharp" by anymeans.. just that my 80-200 AF-S seemed sharper (however so little the difference) than my 70-200 VR wide open. But with the D300.. this does not seem to be the case anymore..
well there are just enough more megapixels that there will be some small difference because of that, and if the AA filter is also a bit weaker, then there is some effect there. in my post processing, i am treating the D300, the D2X and the D3 the same as far as sharpening.
Hangman you are not loosing it. I do not own a D300 but there are some factors that could be contributing to the increased sharpness or the perception of sharper images.
In the first place, the filter on the sensor is different than what Nikon used in previous models. There is always some sharpness lost to conversion from analog to digital and the filter could be minimizing that. For JPEG the new processing engine could be doing a better job than previous engines. As was stated before, it is also possible that the correction of CA also plays an important part in all this. There could be other factors that I ignore and megapixels could be one of them.
This subject is most interesting. I wish I had more information available to me.
William Rodriguez
Miami, Florida.
