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Good news for those not quite ready to take the plunge to purchase the new Nikon D700, but tiring of some of the problems they may have been experiencing with their D3 or D300; Nikon has made some more adjustments. The latest in the D3 firmware upgrades include some nifty function button customization options, although before you get too excited… no these are not the same ones featured on the D700.  There were also some adjustments to the AF and white balance mode, as well as the playback mode.

A major concern for many users of both the D3 and D300 was one that has come to be known as “Dead Battery Syndrome”, wherein the battery indicator would incorrectly register an empty battery. Nikon fixed this issue as well.

If you’re hoping to get lots of the D700 features in the firmware, it didn’t really happen.  The only one to show up is the addition of a visualization of the virtual horizon function to live view mode. The D3 changes add three more options that can be assigned to the Function, Preview or AE-L/AF-L buttons. The only totally original option is the ability to scroll between shooting menu banks (user-defined presets) with a button press and turn of the control dial. The firmware also separates the image area (FX/DX/5:4) option into two, so that you can choose to either scroll between all three image sizes or just between FX and DX.

While still not entirely perfect (then again, what is?), the updates do alleviate some of the annoying bugs that existed. Good job Nikon.

Read [Nikon]

D3 firmware v2.00 can be downloaded from the following links: [Mac] [PC]

D300 firmware v1.03 can be downloaded from the following links: [Mac] [PC]