Gadgetory

hi i'm lori green and senior editor for CNET and this is the nikon d50 300 the replacement for its popular d50 200 the Nikon d50 300 delivers a slightly redesigned and noticeably smaller and lighter body the incorporation of a sensor without an optical low-pass filter bigger and better viewfinder in LCD and an expanded feature set which now includes Wi-Fi and geo-tagging built right into the camera combined with the new 18 to 140 millimeter lens kit you get a more expensive but still a great option for the family photographer enthusiast the design and interface are fundamentally the same as the d50 200 while it's smaller and lighter it still feels comfortable to use and reasonably well built the grips redesigned to increase the clearance between your hand in the lens it really does feel more comfortable the drive mode button had to be relocated to the side in order to make room for the Wi-Fi and GPS antennas and I actually prefer it there the LCD and viewfinder are both bigger and a bit nicer it also has a stereo microphone now my only real complaint is about the multi controller it feels a little too flat and hard to maneuver precisely the camera incorporates a new version of Nikon's X speed image processor which allows for the addition of 1080 60 P video and better battery life although the camera does have a new battery the GPS intermittently failed to tag images though even when I hadn't moved connecting to mobile devices via Wi-Fi works relatively seamlessly though the camera doesn't have NFC to smooth the kinks of connecting and Nikon's app has limited tethered shooting capabilities you can't change any settings but you can touch focus I don't like that the app stays loaded in memory on Android when you disconnect it's performance remains roughly the same as the d50 200 which is pretty good for this class live view shooting is still on the slow disappointing side but by all other measures including its 5.1 frame per second JPEG burst I think most people will be pretty happy with it if you shoot RAW it's still insufficient for continuous shooting since it still only has six frame bursts buffer the anti-aliasing filter free sensor produces great photos and the extra sharpness it provides plus the excellent JPEG processing results in useable images as high as ISO 6400 in a body less than $1,000 that's really really good even shooting in 14 bit raw doesn't seem to preserve a lot of highlight detail but the camera tends to underexpose as a rule and you can recover a lot of shadow detail without introducing a lot of noise I'm not crazy about the cameras default settings they include normal image quality rather than fine which is a higher compression level manual adjustments during movie shooting are turned off and what's a real pain for me sequential file numbering defaults to off with the d50 300 Nikon remains at the head of the class of sub 1000 dslr's I'm Lauri grinning and this is the Nikon d50