Nikon D300S to D600 Transition Comparisons

     So, I’ve been casually using my Nikon D600 a bit lately and have been getting more familiar with it.  I come from a D300S, which I had for maybe 6 years prior to getting the D600.  So now I know enough to do a comparison between the two.  The pros, cons, and some things that jut need adjusting when switching between the two cameras.  I might say, that I never fully used the D300S.  I use a lot of the basic stuff, but not so much the plethora of adjustment in the camera.  In any case, here goes..

Quick comparison of switching to a Nikon D600 from a Nikon D300S:

Pros

- I’ll start with the obvious: better low light performance, and depth of field control on the FX sensor

- Connector doors on the left side are much improved on the D600.  Instead of the one piece rubber door, that is consistently a pint to seal, the D600 has three separate doors with proper hinges.  Yay.

- The D600 has Scene modes, like a point and shoot.  At first I thought it was pretty cheesy and almost offensive to have these on a close to $2000 camera body, but some of the odd ones may come in handy instead of having to fiddle with 5 or more adjustments.

- Custom Menu – the D600 has a menu at the bottom that you can select the popular menu selections you frequently use out of any of the categories to have them all in one menu for quick access.  Yay again.  No longer are the days where I have to scroll though pages of menu items I never or rarely ever use, just to get to the white balance or ISO auto adjustment menus.

- The body is actually lighter for the D600 than D300S.  Although that is offset by the heavier lenses you have to use for full frame sensors.

- The D600 has a better battery latch mechanism than the D600.  It is purpose built with a latch for the battery and a spring to eject the battery, with the door providing only the function of covering the battery..  The D300S has a lower cost design that the door itself is the latch holding in the battery, and the springs are the actual battery contacts.

- Most functions to control the ISO, focus, exposure, white balance, and even size/type of files can be accessed through the rear buttons, holding them and rotating the selectors instead of having to go into the camera menus in the D300S.  That’s awesome.

Cons

- Battery life when left on:  for some reason, the battery seems to drain fast on the D600 when I inadvertently leave the camera on while uploading photos to my computer or whatever.  My D300 seemed to last much longer when this happens.  Leave the D600 on overnight and the battery is dead.  The D300 would only drain a small amount.

- Having to switch battery formats is a bit of a negative, since I had extra batteries for my D300S I could have used.  Although the reason for the format change was to lessen the potential to short the contacts out.  And the new ones have more capacity, so that is a positive to offset the negative.

- I use a Nikon AH-4 handstrap with my camera.  On my D300S, it didn’t interfere with the battery door and battery removal.  On the D600 it does, and I have to rotate the bottom plate out of the way (thankfully don’t have to remove it) to remove the battery.

- The D600 only allows up to a three bracket exposure set for some reason.  Despite the higher inherent dynamic range on the D600, I would much prefer the options on the D300S with up to 9, I don’t know why it can’t have more, it’s only a software change.  On the good side, you can choose a spread up to 2ev on the D600.  The D300S was only 1ev max.

- The controls for light metering pattern, and autofocus have been changed significantly.  I think I prefer the D300S style better, with the hard switches for both, the focus at the top of the back panel and the light metering on the bottom.  Instead, now you have to hold a button down and use the selector wheels to change things.  It’s just not as quick.

- The soft flash button.  The flash doesn’t automatically pop up when the button is pressed for the flash as the D300S had.  On the D600, the flack will pop up when you press the shutter.

- Focus range of field – the D300S has more autofocus points and when choosing a single point focus, has a greater range in the visible field, if I want to focus on something that is near the edge of the field of view.

Other Things

- The zoom in and zoom out buttons for viewing photos are reversed on the D600.  Instead of zooming out, I keep hitting the erase photo lock button instead.

- Bracketing on D300S I needed to trigger each shot by itself.  D600 it does the bracketing sequence automatically, which is probably a good thing, since the photos are in close succession.

- The size/weight of the battery charger.  Seriously, this MH-25 beast of a charger is unnecessarily huge and a terrible design..  I spend a good deal of time lugging around gear to take landscape photography.  A small, lightweight charger would have been more appropriate and useful.  Why design such a large charger for no reason except to impress??









Please excuse the photos, I was feeling lazy/drunk today to produce some decent comparison photos :-)