Nikon's latest DSLR cameras have a new feature called "Active D-Lighting". Its present in the D60, D300, D700 and D3 at the moment (and since the D60 has it, I dare say that the successor of the D80 will also have it).
Active D-Lighting is supposed to help tame high contrast situations, helping to avoid washed out highlights and drowned shadows at the same time. Sounds great, doesn't it?
But how does it work? Simply put, its a combination of an automatic exposure compensation and the regular "D-Lighting" feature (that can be applied as an in-camera edit for quite a long time in various models). The camera automatically chooses a shorter exposure time to preserve the highlights, and then brings up the shadows a little bit with some tone curve adjustments. Its nothing that happens on the sensor level or some other nonsense.
You guessed right - Active D-Lighting is really a feature thats mostly aiming at the JPEG shooters. If you shoot raw (did I mention that you should?) all you get from ADL is the automatic exposure compensation - which might come in handy at times, of course (I shoot high contrast scenes after spot metering the brightest parts and trying to expose to the right as far as possible without blowing the highlights). If you're not using Nikon's own Capture NX software, you have to take care of the shadows afterwards yourself (the fact that ADL was used is embedded into the raw file and CNX can interpret it, other raw converters can't).
Its a step into the right direction and helps to create pictures that are closer to what we see with our own eyes. Blown out highlights and the limited dynamic range of the normal sensors are the key problem of digital photography (IMHO). But at the moment, the only technology that has a really big impact is Fuji's SuperCCD sensor (as used in the Finepix S5pro and other cameras). Active D-Lighting is no match for that.
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