apologies for not getting back to you sooner, was the weee hours of the night here. The d300 is a camera I did not use, however a photographer from AP was impressed with it! Mind you that was on the Friday as well, it was terrible weather and wind strong enough to not only blow my hat off, it blew his camera raincover clean off!!!! Anyway, he was shooting a place called Lukey Hieghts. The bikes apppear at around 240kmh on a turn at the highest peak on the track. Great for bold shots, but you reaction time and especially your AF has to be spot on. He was really happy, in fact was a bit taken by it, more than he expected. Make sure you give it a go, even go to your local Nikon Pro office and ask them for a test run, even if it's on the spot. I could really ramble on here, but you'll have to test them yourselves to see what I mean.
The D300 is indeed looking pretty good. Here's a link (finally) to some real world images. Make what you want of the D300/D200 comparison methodology (or lack thereof) in the review, but the D300 images images look pretty good. I know that the focus and depth of field may be off on one or the other of these, but I think this is starting to give us a feel for what this camera will be capable of as far as image quality is concerned.
Gerald- I'm not sure what happened, but the last part of your link didn't get incorporated into the link... so when I clicked on it I got a 'this page didn't load' in Spanish. I simply typed ,1_3713 after the link as it was left off and the page loaded properly.
What you wanna look at if you're interested in ISO performance is about 1/2 down the page, the pasta in the bowls. The 3200 ISO jgp out of the d300 puts the d200 to shame. THANK YOU! Maybe this will help the doubters. I'll go out on a limb and say that the d300 @ 6400 looks better than a d200 @ 3200.
My only beef is, why use the 18-200mm vr lens for most of the shots. The pasta shots were taken with a 50mm.
Here's what I get from the article, given my limited Spanish- The reviewer didn't have a lot of time to play with the camera, just the weekend. So he did a quick comparison with the d200. The d300 had the final version firmware (definitiva= final? Sounds final!).
Looks like there was a significant difference in light and color difference between the two cameras d200 and d300. They say the d300 has better detail. This is speaking about the shots of a cathedral type building just above the pasta bowls. I gotta agree by looking at the detail in the crop shots.
Don't trust my translation too much Look for yourselves!
Rich
Somehow the D200 shots on that link seem more underexposed than the D300 shots, so I think it's a tough comparison, but the D300 definitely looks at least a stop (maybe 1.5?) cleaner and more detailed too.
Could D-Lighting be making the difference in exposure? The histograms are quite different for the two cameras though the exposure settings look similar.
Look for yourselves!