Maintaining Image Quality - Nikon D300 Complete Manual

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the battery into the camera without taking the rubber band

off, any battery I find in my pack with the rubber band on

must be charged and ready for use. To keep the rubber

band from falling off, make sure to wrap it around the

battery so that it falls in the "crease."

Use the battery cap. One clever user has placed green

and red stickers on the bottom of his EN-EL3 batteries and

then cut out a section of the plastic battery cap that Nikon

supplies so that the color shows through. By careful

placement of the stickers and by reversing the cap, either

the red or the green sticker shows through.

Maintaining Image Quality

You'll get the highest quality images out of the D300 if you:

Shoot NEF format. You have the original sensor data to

deal with, and can apply different interpolation routines

on it after the fact. The D300 JPEG engine still seems just

a bit "soft" to me, though not nearly as bad as the D100

was, and better than the D200 was. If you don't shoot

NEF, see "Dealing with JPEG" on page <673>. Note that

you don't have to shoot NEF+JPEG if all you're looking for

is a for-position-only JPEG. All you need is a tool to

extract the embedded JPEG preview from the NEF file.

Get the exposure right. Incorrect exposure has impacts on

all kinds of image quality issues, including visibility of

noise, contrast, and much more. See "How to Interpret

Histograms" on page <267>. Any underexposure of a

D300 image tends to produce more visible noise,

Thom Hogan's Complete Guide to the Nikon D300