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I love the D300 for low light photography without a flash - but of course flexibility to drive a flash or external strobe light is an important feature for a DSLR. And studying the manuals pointed me to two other advantages that the D300 has compared to the 40D.

1. Strobe sync speed through the PC connector is 1/250s on the Nikon D300 but only 1/60s with the Canon 40D; if you have reasonable ambient light and want to work with a large aperture, the 1/60s can get you enough ambient light onto the sensor that your picture appears slightly blurred if your subject moves
2. The fastest sync speed with dedicated flash units on the D300 is 1/8000s when using the SB-800, SB-600 or SB-R200. On the 40D the fastest sync speed is 1/250s, regardless of the flash that you use. This prevents you from doing some interesting types of shots (where you completely black out the background by going to a very fast shutter speed and using the flash to just light the foreground subject)

Since I really like to experiment with different flash settings and especially off-camera flash (more on that later) I think those are two major drawbacks of the 40D.

Update: As Ryan pointed out in the comment below, this may not be correct after all! While the documentation of the 40D doesn’t mention it (at least not that I could find it, and I spent a bit of time with the PDF and the search function of Acrobat Reader), it appears that you can make it do the long-pulse fast shutter sync up to 1/8000s, just like the D300, assuming you have the 580EX-II flash. As for the PC sync speed, Ryan doesn’t know for sure, either, but believes that it can do 1/250s as wel. I’d love to hear from people who have tried that…

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I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?