“Rolling Shutter” Plagues Nikon’s D300s Video

August 31, 2009 by admin · View Comments 


Nikon’s brand new D300s is hitting store shelves this week. It’s an incremental upgrade on the legendary D300. It adds a few new features but the big one for me was video.

Unfortunately, a problem that plagued Nikon’s first SLR video feature in the D90 continues with the D300s – rolling shutter. Basically fast moving objects or camera pans can result in some distortion due to how the camera’s sensor reads and outputs data. While not a deal breaker for me, it is disappointing that a problem that existed in a Nikon product from last year is still going unfixed on their latest mid-level flagship product.

You can see the problem first hand in the video above.

Read more about the problem (and a fix) at Chase Jarvis’ excellent blog.

Here’s some footage I shot during a recent vacation to Hawaii. It works much better when the camera is locked down:

Here are some additional videos I shot with the D300s earlier, mostly handheld:

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