D7100's suitability as D300 replacement...

Your post caught my attention as we will be visiting Arches National Park and Bryce Canyon in early March. I will only have two days but hopefully will be back for longer trips in the future as it is not that far by western standards from Albuquerque.

I do a lot of sports photography so i will be curious how the camera performs. I always like to have two cameras with me, for sports, events, and even when on vacation or looking for landscape shots. My wide to normal lenses stay on the D800 and telephoto on my current D300S.

I love shooting sports but financially I am expecting my cash flow to come from mainly portraits. I do a lot of shooting for our NM Lobos but I am not the paid photographer. What I am getting at is I cannot justify a D4 and the 300 or 400mm 2.8 lenses needed for a full frame action camera. Since I do occasionally use a telephoto for landscapes I like the idea of 24 megapixels and I am guessing high iso performance will be an improvement with the D7100 over the D300S. The D7100 with the 70-200 2.8 can be a great combination for indoor events such as concerts.

I guess some people are complaining about the size and certain ergonomic features but to me this is not a huge problem, actually smaller makes it easier to carry around with all my other gear. So my only concern will be the frame rate. I shoot sports in raw and I rarely machine gun anything, but there are time when I do like when someone steals the ball and goes in for a dunk. Sometimes you need a sequence to get that one perfect shot.

I do not use the battery grip and I know shooting in raw I am not getting any 7 frames a second, and there are many times the perfect shot may be the one I could have gotten with and extra shot or two per second. It appears shooting raw the frame rate would be much lower with the D7100 compared to the D300S.

But if there is virtually no difference shooting jpgs then maybe this is not a problem. I like using raw because it is easier to tweak white balance or save detail if highlights blown for example. If dynamic range and noise performance is much improved then I could easily live with shooting jpgs for those few times when I would like a high frame rate.

So my big question is does the slower buffer mainly effect raw? I am thinking it does otherwise why post the spec of 7 frames per second. What I love is the price, personally it seems like a lot of camera for the money. So if high iso and dynamic range shooting are improved and I can get 7 shots a second using jpgs then I may not worry about when the D400 comes out. I will wait to just before fall sports season, but the D7100 could be in my future plans.

Gary

--
http://www.garystepicphotography.com