The Best Digital SLR for Action

Continuous Shot Speed

Every digital SLR can be set to take multiple consecutive photos when you hold down the shutter release button.

The continuous shot speed of a digital SLR is measured in frames (or photos) per second (FPS).

This table shows how the Nikon D300 measures up against some of the competition:

Camera	Frames Per Second (FPS)
Nikon D300	6
Canon 40D	6.5
Sony DSLR-A700	5
Olympus E-3	5

Aha! you say - the Nikon D300 really isn't the fastest camera when it come to continuous burst rate.

Well, it is if you pair it with the MB-D180 Battery Grip. With this device installed on the base of the camera, the D300's continuous photos speed leaps up to 8 frames per second.

Buffer

When you take a photo with a digital SLR, it temporarily stores the image in memory before it saves it to the memory card.

This temporary memory is called a buffer.

Some cameras have more buffer than others, allowing more continuous shots to be stored before the camera has to take time to write to the memory card.

Here's how the cameras stack up:

Camera	Buffer Size
Nikon D300	100 JPG
Canon 40D	75 JPG
Sony DSLR-A700	Unlimited JPG *
Olympus E-3	Unlimited JPG *

* Depends on image size and speed of memory card

While the D300 may not have the most massive buffer relative to the competition, you'll be hard-pressed to ever take 100 consecutive photos at 6 frames per second without ever letting up on the shutter.

Autofocus

The last criteria used to select the best digital SLR for action photography is the autofocus system.

In order to track moving subjects, you either need to be exceptionally gifted with manual focus, or you need an autofocus system that is up to the job.

Let's take another look at the specifications for each camera:

Camera	Autofocus Points
Nikon D300	51
Canon 40D	9
Sony DSLR-A700	11
Olympus E-3	11

In selecting the D300 as their digital SLR camera of 2007, the editors of PopPhoto.com expressed their amazement at the camera's ability to "track subjects by color and even skin tone." Plus, the AF system on the D300 is the "fastest in very low light and most sophisticated we've ever seen."

ISO Performance

When you're taking photos of fast-moving subjects you're not always going to be blessed with enough light.

This is especially true if you take a lot of action photos indoors (gymnasium) or at night.

In these instances, you need all the shutter speed you can get with the limited amount of available light. One way to get a nice fast shutter speed in dim light is to increase the camera's ISO setting.

On older digital SLRs, upping the ISO came bundled with a problem: it also increased the amount of digital noise or grain in your photos, which degraded the image quality.

Not so with the D300.

The D300 is able to produce low-noise high-quality images all the way up to ISO 1600, and it even produces acceptable images at ISO 6400.

This means that you can achieve fast shutter speeds even when the available light is exceptionally dim.