Fast Agile Beautiful

Page 2

Framing Rate

This is a camera intended for action, with 9fps at full speed and11fps in crop mode. The image may be cropped to a variety of sizes and aspect rations including the popular 5:4 ratio.

There is a 'silent' shutter mode which extends the mirror movement time but in truth does little to the sound – it is not silent.

The burst depth is 27 frames of RAW but the pause before we could start shooting again was quite short. A burst depth of 120 frames is claimed for JPEG shooting. In practice, shooting JPEG Fine we got 34 frames before the camera paused. Buffering the files to an 8GB 300x Lexar cards took 24 seconds. Using small JPEGs allows up to 120 frames to be shot in a burst according to the specifications.

The camera weights 2.4kg equipped with the 24mm to 70mm f2.8 Nikkor. This is quite heavy and it remains a fact that many women photographers would prefer the lighter D300 or D700 and accept the limitations that this imposes. The D700 would still require the full-frame lenses with something of a weight penalty, a D300s would reduce the body weight by some 300g plus a reduction if a smaller, true DX lens was used. The D3S has the same feel as its D3 cousins (the D3X and D3) and sits comfortably and easily in the hand.

For comparative purposes here is the Nikon 'pro' line-up as it stands:

The shots

Squash

This was a real challenge. Squash courts are quite dimly lit and the court gave an incident light reading of 1/125 f2.8 at 3200ISO. This, though, was just the start of our troubles! The court lights were dimming (and losing colour temperature) in line with the voltage frequency (or possibly a harmonic of it). On about 50% of the shots there was a band of discolouration due to the dip in the lights and this tracked the orientation of the camera indicating that it was the movement of the focal plane shutter catching the dips; (see the screen grab of the thumbnails).

Despite this we managed to complete the assignment, shooting typically at 1/1600 f2.8 ISO 6400. A Macbeth Chart, shot and calibrated using ACR Calibrator, delivered an average error of 3.9ΔE₀₀ which is a good result under the circumstances. We shot using a mixture of the 105mm f2.8 Micro Nikkor and 24–70 f2.8 zoom lens. At 6400 ISO our exposures varied between 1/640 and 1/1600 at f2.8 on an outside court and up to 1/2000 on the (better lit) show court. None of these shutter speeds came close to stopping the ball movement if it had been hit at full tilt.

The Professional Imagemaker

Test Puppies

We used this pair of rascals to check out the auto focus capabilities. It is one of the harder tests and consists of throwing the ball for the dogs to chase and seeing how well the focus-tracking copes. Both 105mm f2.8 Micro Nikkors and 300mm F4 Nikkors were used.

ABOVE: We obtained reasonable colour correction despite the lighting problems. The screen grab, on the left, shows the thumbnails in Bridge and the dark tan colouration due to loss of line voltage on the lighting systems.

The day was bright so we chose to use 400 ISO. The image shown full page in the opening spread was shot at 1/3200 at f4 (on 300mm). The focus plane matches the target area that was selected within the camera and the nose is just a little soft.

Shooting the dogs running with the sun behind them provided a stern challenge. Here we noted that the focus was failing to track Treacle (the black one) but was coping quite well with Fudge (the golden one). We were obviously at the limits of the system's capability. We were successful about 80% of the time on Fudge but hardly at all on Treacle. Reversing the angle and shooting with the sun behind us improved the hit rate in both dogs. Side-on shots were quite straight forward. Typical exposures in this late afternoon, December sunshine were 1/1000 at f5.6 and an ISO of 400.

We have no data to back it up but we got the impression that the D3S was performing better than the D3 we tested some years ago in the same manner.

A variety of shots showing the auto focus in action.

Page 1 - Page  2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5

Read more articles here

Find the Membership package for you:

Benefits of Membership