2 d300s questions

Bsimon

First, I am in love with this camera. It is fabulous in every respect and for those of you looking for a batt grip I bought the zeikos version and the build quality is top notch and it is less than $60.

1st- does anyone know which focus points other than the center is a cross hair type? Is there any way to select only these points to manually toggle through?

2nd- is there much advantage to shooting in 14bit raw compared to 12 bit? There is a noticeable difference in the size of the files...

Thanks in advance!
Ben

insanefred

I believe there is 51 selectable focus points with 15 cross type mostly in the center. For the D300 I would opt for 12 Bit, as the 14 bit has too much lag I am not sure about the D300s.

It really is hard to notice any difference 12 and 14 bit, unless you really pull up shadows, even then. It's still hard to tell, some folks believe it will give you about an extra 1/2 stop of DR.

cab.in.boston

I think that the middle three columns of five each are the cross type sensors. Not positive, but I think that's how it works (and I think that's what I read in Thom Hogan's reference guide that I'm still working on... dang, that's a long ebook...).

I shoot in 14-bit lossless compressed RAW on my D300. Even if I never really "need" it, and I'm pretty sure my shots aren't noticeably better than if I shot 12, but I just have a problem with throwing away data. My shooting doesn't need the high frame rate, if you do, you'll need to shoot 12-bit or JPEG. I use an 8GB card, and with lossless 14-bit RAW, I can get about 350 to 400 images on there. The display will say 296 shots left, but it calculates that as if they were uncompressed, I think. The actual number of shots that will fit is usually about 1.5x what the display thinks it has room for. However it works, the most I tend to shoot before d/l'ing to the PC is maybe 200 shots, so it doesn't affect me. If you need the extra space, as Insanefred said, you probably won't notice a huge difference, if any at all.