Ironically better is not necessarily more accurate. Take two prints, the bluer one from the D50 and the D300 one and take them outside and visually compare them to the actual sky. I have actions in Photoshop that take me to LAB color space where I can tweak the colors to make them more punchy, and do it in a selective way that doesn't distort other colors; it takes me less than two minutes, and of late I find myself using those techniques less than I used to because the bluer sky has come to look unnatural to me eyes.
That's because the + - values are relative to different bases.
I know what you mean. When I bought my D300 in december 2007, I also had problems with clipping reds when using the built in profiles or when processing in Capture NX. Previously I hadn't used Nikon Capture, but Bibble instead. As I also found Capture NX to be clumsy and with very little support for batch processing, so I tried out various raw converters and ended up with Lightroom. Lightroom is probably not significantly better or worse than say Bibble for PP, but it has all those excellent batch processing options as well as the great keywording functions. Anyway, Lightroom ended my problems with clipping reds (according to my trials, Bibble would also have solved the problem). I believe it's not a hardware camera problem as such but a problem with the processing of the files in the profiles/PP in NX.
"One man wants the mother, another man wants the daughter. That way they both get married." I do find Lightroom intuitive and I was at home with it from day one. To each his own.
Maybe I expressed myself less clearly. What I meant was, that it was not the hardware of the camera that couldn't record the reds properly. It's the software in the camera (and thus also NX), that's the problem, and as such the problem is in the camera. It can be bypassed by shooting raw and using a different converter. Or one can create a custom profile in NX. But I agree, that it would have been better if the camera software had it right from the beginning. On the other hand it's not a very big deal for me. Choosing this or that converter is for me like choosing this or that film. One picks what gives the results one likes best with the least possible hassle.
the root of the problem is that the sensor will capture more colors than can be contained in sRGB or even adobe RGB
The problem with using Active D-Lighting is that it changes the way the camera meters -- particularly with Matrix metering. You can mitigate this tendency by using at Low with Center-weighted metering.
I dont recognise this problem at all!
