It all began about eight years ago, when I started taking photos of my older daughter in her volleyball games. At the time, I had a Minolta DiMage 7, a relatively sophisticated point and shoot for the day. It did fine for outdoor snapshots, but any attempts to capture indoor shots were frustrating at best. I knew relatively little about digital photography at the time, though I’d been shooting with film for years.

You know what happened, of course. The madness sets in.

Pointing in the General Direction

That DiMage 7 actually did fine in daylight, when I didn’t need to push the ISO. On the other hand, my composition left something to be desired. Here’s a typical shot, taken in bright daylight at ISO 100, f/6.7 and 1/350th of a second.

Daylight is Easy

The actual action is sharp enough. Seventh grade volleyball players don’t move all that fast. But the composition leaves a lot to be desired. I should have either framed it a bit better when I took the shot, or creatively cropped it.

Back to the madness. It all ramped up rather slowly. I’d been watching the evolution of digital SLRs (DSLRs), but they were either too limited or too expensive for my tastes and budget. At the time, I owned a Nikon N80 consumer film SLR, but hadn’t used it much. The limitations of film were becoming increasingly annoying. I no longer had access to a darkroom, and the idea of shooting black and white wasn’t really appealing any more.

It all came to a head when I dropped off four rolls of film (Fuji ISO 800, if I recall correctly). I’d pushed the film to ISO 1600 to shoot some indoor volleyball. I suspected they wouldn’t turn out all that well, as I had little feel for shooting action photography at the time; most of what I’d enjoyed shooting until that time were landscapes.

But I never knew whether they were good or not. The very expensive, professional photo lab who was going to develop and print the photos completely and utterly screwed them up. They lost two of the four rolls, and somehow exposed the other two to so much light, they were rendered useless.

They offered to replace the film. That was certainly generous of them (yes, I’m being sarcastic.)

That was in late 2003. In 2004, Nikon shipped the D70. I bought one, and never looked back.

That first D70 became more of a proving ground for me than anything. I dove in, experimented, learned more about the digital side, and began buying lenses. I rapidly discovered that what I wanted was a fast lens, so I picked up a Tamron 28-75 f2.8.

At the time, I knew nothing of crop factors or lens quality. I got lucky with that particular lens, because it’s one of the sharper zooms that Tamron makes – or at least, my copy was very good. But the range and maximum focal length was a little limited. I still didn’t fully understand the implications of white balance, and usually just set the camera to JPEG mode. Oh, and my compositions still sucked, with or without cropping. Take, for example, this stellar example. Where’s the ball? What’s the context of this picture? Is she setting the ball, or is this a pass? Who knows?

What is this shot all about? I don't know, either!

What follows are impressions of using the D300s. I’m comparing it mainly to the D300 I’ve been using for the past eighteen months. I may also comment a bit on the D90, since I used that fairly extensively last during the first few months of 2009, but most of my comparisons are to the D300.

This is also not meant to be an exhaustive review, but a set of impressions based on what interests me as a photographer.

Context: My Photographic Interests

For the past several years, I’ve been shooting indoor volleyball. My oldest daughter was on her high school varsity team, but she’s heading off to university in a week or so. Shooting indoor sports means shooting in venues with poor, uneven lighting. You also need to shoot at high shutter speeds. The combination of crappy lighting and fast motion necessarily means shooting at high ISOs with fast lenses.

Volleyball: Fast and Furious

When Elizabeth entered her senior year, I thought that it would be my last year shooting action shots in low light. My younger daughter, Emily proved me wrong. She decided to join the school marching band as a member of the Color Guard and went on to participate in Winter Guard, which involves indoor competition in – you guessed it – venues with crappy, uneven lighting.

Winter Guard: Four to Eight Minutes of Indoor Action

• Anandtech
• Hot Hardware
• Maximum PC
• Tech Report

Certainly any new processor and platform, like the new P55 chipset, is benchmarked to death. If you take a sort of metacritic approach to the reviews, you can get a pretty good picture of how the new platform behaves in a wide array of performance metrics.

However, I took a narrower view of Lynnfield testing: digital photography processing. How does the new platform compare to the older, but more powerful X58 platform? I ran a number of different benchmarks of actual photographic applications. Let’s see how Intel’s new mainstream quad core CPU shapes up for digital photographers.

I took a look at overall performance using several professional grade applications. Each operation was performed on 100 12 megapixel images, captured with a Nikon D300. The benchmarks included:

• Adobe Camera Raw 5.4 conversion to JPEG using Auto White Balance and Auto Exposure settings.
• Bibble 4.9 conversion from RAW to JPEG using default settings.
• Noise Ninja batch noise reduction on 100 JPEG images, using default settings, but with the Nikon D300 noise profiles loaded.
• Noiseware noise reduction on those same 100 images, with default settings.
• Photoshop CS4, with a number of filters executed as a set of automated actions. This was based on the PC Magazine Photoshop test, but I used one of my own images, and added noise reduction to the script.

Lynnfield and P55 Basics

Before I dive into the results, it’s worth talking a bit about the Lynnfield platform, though the reviews I linked to earlier will cover features, speeds and feeds exhaustively. However, here are the hightlights of the new processor:

• Lynnfield consists of two product lines, the Core i5 700 series and the Core i7 800 series.
• Lynfnield differs from the existing Core i7 900 series mainly by being socket 1156 CPUs. So they have fewer pins. The memory controller is dual channel DDR3, not triple channel, as it is with the Core i7 900.
• Some of the 1156 pins in Lynnfield are allocated for PCI Express, since the PCI Express controller has been pulled into the CPU itself. So P55 is mainly an I/O chip.
• The differences between Core i5 and Core i7 are mainly clock speed and Hyper-Threading (simultaneous multithreading.)
• All Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs are quad core and have 256KB of L2 cache exclusive to each core and 8MB of shared L3 cache.
• Currently, two Core i7 800 series CPUs were announced, the Core i7 860 and Core i7 870. The 850 runs at 2.80GHz and the 870 runs at 2.93GHz. That makes both Lynnfield processors slower than the existing Core i7 950 and 975 CPUs.
• The Core i5 750 runs at 2.66GHz. It does not support Hyper-Threading.

Lynnfield requires a new chipset, the P55, which has the requisite LGA1156 socket. Since the memory controller is only dual channel, the new socket only needs 1156 pins instead of the 1366 pins sockets on X58 motherboard. This, in turn, should allow for lower costs for both motherboards and CPUs.

Of course, in its pursuit of market segmentation, Intel will keep Lynnfield clock speeds lower than the Core i7 900 CPUs, but Lynnfield CPUs will also cost less. Let’s look at Intel’s just-announced Lynnfield wholesale pricing for boxed, retail CPUs. Core i7 900 series prices are added to the list:

The anomaly is the Core i7 920. For $85 more than a Core i5 750, you get Hyper-Threading and three memory channels. Is it worth it? At the stock clock rates, it’s probably not worth it. We’ll have to see which CPU has the most overclocking headroom.

Memory quantity is also a concern. If you want to really pump up the amount of memory, then the triple channel Core i7 900’s are your best bet. It’s much easier to get to 12 or 24GB in six sockets than four. At least one motherboard maker, Gigabyte, is building a P55 motherboard using six memory sockets, but you still need to populate them in pairs, not triples.

Benchmarking. Lots of Benchmarking

The good news is that I’ll be covering some of these products for other publications, which generally means using the suite of performance tests they’ve developed over time. It also means I get to run performance tests I want to run.

When I was writing for Ziff-Davis, the folks at PCMag labs and I tacitly agreed to run a common set of benchmarks. That way, they could always refer to my tests, and easily compare them to their system benchmarks. It was useful on my end, too, because I could easily point to their system reviews and use them in my own articles.

Now, though, I get to do my own thing. For example, I really don’t care what Sysmark 2007 Preview tells me. It’s not useful to me for the kinds of things I do. I care about digital photography and video encoding performance. I care about games performance. I’m not too concerned about 3D Studio performance, though I may go ahead and run a few tests, like the Cinebench 10 benchmark, for my own use.

Photography and Video Encoding

But I will be expanding the photographic tests. The PCMag Photoshop filter benchmark is okay as far as it goes, but it seems pretty random in how it goes about what it does. I’ll try to build a similar test using filters that I’ve used, including noise reduction filters. I’m expanding the noise reduction benchmark, too, using both Noiseware and Noise Ninja.

Another test will be raw image conversion, which I’ll replicate using Adobe Photoshop CS4 RAW, but also Bibble Pro, a highly regarded photographic workflow tool. I may also include Adobe Lightroom, but I’m still mulling how to best use that particular tool as a performance test.

While we’re talking about Adobe, I’m hoping to include a Premiere Pro CS4 render to a DVD image. I don’t want to actually burn a DVD – including optical drive performance would add too many variables.

I’ll also take a look at some transcoding only benchmarks, like DiVX and MainConcept’s encoders.

History occasionally repeats itself, so of course, I accidentally left the D70 on an airplane when I was on vacation. Unlike the first time, I stayed with SLRs, replacing the D70 with a D70s, then a D80 and finally the D300. I’ve also had my share of point-and-shoot compacts, and liked a few, but now I use the D300 almost exclusively.

But SLRs aren’t for everyone. If you’re thinking about getting a digital SLR, and are on the fence, here are five reasons to avoid jumping onto the digital SLR bandwagon.

I currently own two SLRs, a Nikon D300 and a Nikon D90, plus assorted lenses. By September, Elizabeth will head off to UCLA with the D90. However, the D90 will be replaced by a D300s, so I’ll still have two SLRs. So when I talk to other people, the often ask me which SLR they should get. Rather than diving into speeds and feeds, we discuss exactly what they want to accomplish. Usually, what they really need is a fairly high end point-and-shoot camera, not an SLR.

Here are just a few reasons I’ve heard to justify a digital SLR purchase, and why those reasons aren’t necessarily valid.

Megapixels

Oddly, many potential SLR buyers are under the impression that SLRs have more megapixels than point-and-shoot cameras. While this might be true for some prosumer and higher end SLRs, like the 24 megapixel Nikon D3X, most affordable DSLRs range from 10 – 15 megapixels. Even modest point and shoot cameras now offer 10 megapixels, and some go much higher.

So don’t rush out and get a DSLR for megapixel count. That’s simply not a valid way to compare any cameras. At some point, more pixels aren’t necessarily better. You can print very good looking 8 x 10 prints with 8 – 10 megapixel images and 13 x 19 prints with 12 megapixels.

So raw megapixel count is a poor reason to buy a DSLR. Pixel density, on the other hand, might be a better reason.

Interchangeable Lenses

This is one reason that, on first blush, seems like a great reason to buy an SLR. After all, SLRs are made for switching lenses, right? You can use just the right lens for the right type of photo.

Well, no.

I’ve known camera buyers who buy an SLR with two kit lenses. Typically, it would be a combo like an 18-55mm and 55-200mm. That sounds great in theory. In practice, the average user almost never switches a lens. My daughter uses a Nikon 18-200 superzoom almost exclusively with the D90. Except for the fact that she often shoots in pretty low light, she might as well have a superzoom point-and-shoot.

Another issue with interchangeable SLR lens is dust on the sensor. Whenever you swap a lens, you run the risk of dust getting on the sensor, and suddenly you have ugly dust spots on your photos. While many SLRs now can vibrate the sensor to shake off dust, sometimes you get dust that stubbornly adheres to the sensor. That usually means a  $35 – $100 trip to your camera dealer, who can clean sensors professionally.

Often what’s better is to get a good quality superzoom point and shoot. So if you’re considering getting an SLR so you can swap out lenses, then consider a superzoom point and shoot camera instead.

So I pre-ordered a D300s. But I already have a D300. Why I did such a crazy thing is after the jump.

For me, the most interesting thing is the D300s body. It’s also useful to contrast Thom Hogan’s gentle criticisms of the D300s with the somewhat more enthusiastic hands-on preview by Richard Butler at DPReview. There’s some disagreement, for example, about the new control set. DPReview is a little more bullish, comparing the new D300 control layout to that on the D700. Hogan, on the other hand, seems to think that the layout is getting a little to complex:

Thom Hogan: “We’re up to 20 buttons on the D300s (haven’t counted the menu items yet, but I’m sure that’s up, too). Frankly, this is becoming a bit troublesome to me. The new dedicated buttons all make sense and open up shortcuts that are welcome, but as a designer it strikes me that we already have too many buttons haphazardly spread across the camera. I sincerely hope that Nikon will work with some pro photographers and rethink their current proliferation strategy and come up with a more direct, innovative way to control future cameras.”

Despite that, I pre-ordered a D300s body.

Why, you ask? After all, didn’t I go into a lengthy discussion about buying what you really want??

Yes, but I really want this. Let me rationalize my decision.

For the past several years, I’ve been shooting indoor volleyball. My older daughter played varsity at her high school, and last year, her team made it to the California State Championships.

A typical five game match averages 3-4 games (rarely going to five). That means about a 60-90 minute game, depending on how competitive the two teams are. One camera body worked fine for volleyball. I’d switch between the 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED and the 24-70mm f/2.8G ED as needed.

Last year, things changed. Elizabeth wrapped up her last year of high school. Meanwhile, my younger daughter, Emily, is now doing color guard (as part of the marching band) and Winter Guard. Winter Guard is a standalone sport, taking place inside gymnasiums with terrible light. Marching band performances either take place during football game half-time, or in standalone competitions. A band may be on the field for no more than 10-12 minutes. In Winter Guard, they’re on and off the floor in eight minutes.

In other words, switching lenses becomes problematic.

Last winter, I borrowed the D90 that Elizabeth uses, and was able to get some pretty good shots with that, but was somewhat frustrated by the control and autofocus limitations. Plus, I would have liked something better than four frames a second.

So the D300s will fill that second body gap nicely. I’ll probably put the 24-70mm f/2.8G ED on that body, because I may actually use it for video on occasion. (The D300s now does contrast autofocus — slow, but at least it’s not manual.) I’ll probably invest in an external microphone, though, like the Rode VideoMic.

Note that the D300s is a DX format sensor, not full frame like Nikon D700 or D3/D3x. This was actually a conscious choice on my part. I used a D700 for several weeks last year. I loved the low light performance, but I also discovered I needed the longer reach that the 1.5x crop factor of a DX format sensor gives me. That was useful in shooting volleyball, but it’s even more essential for marching band photography, which takes place in stadium sized venues.

Making rational choices for gear, whether it’s cars, cameras, computer components or home theater gear is always a tricky business. But the key word here is “rational.” And I think I made a rational choice.

But it’s going to be hard to wait for it to arrive nonetheless…