| Product: |
Nikon D60 |
| Date: |
20/05/08 (386 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Good build quality, great range of features, not too heavy
Disadvantages: Easy to accidentally press the menu buttons
As my hobby is digital manipulation, a good camera is a must, and my husband has just bought me the Nikon D60. This became available in January 2008 to replace the Nikon D40X. Specifications are as follows:
Type: Digital SLR
Megapixels: 10.2
Weight: 495g
Memory: Multimedia card, SD memory card, SDHC memory card
Lens Aperture: F3.5 - 5.6
Optical Zoon: 3x
Flash: pop-up on-camera flash
Viewfinder: optical
Battery (included): Li-ion rechargeable
Retail price: around £450 including VAT (It says £499.99 above, but I've seen it in several shops and online at £450ish)
*Build*
This is a neat little camera which, while not as light as a compact, is light enough to carry around at all times if you wish. It has a rugged feel to it, and the right hand side (as you look from the back), is thicker, to provide an easy way to hold the camera. Most controls are on the top right (again as seen from the back). There is a decent sized view screen, which also acts as an LCD programme display, with information such as aperture and speed settings, battery life, etc, and access to the settings menus. Down one side of this screen are buttons for viewing your pictures, accessing the menus, and zooming in and out on the screen. On the other side are controls for navigating through menus and pictures, and deleting pictures.
*Features*
This camera can be used in several ways, all of which are accessible by a fairly large control on the top. You can choose to work in completely manual mode, choosing all the settings yourself, or completely automatic, leaving it all to the camera. In addition, there are modes for No Flash (otherwise, the camera decides if flash is necessary), Portrait, Landscape, Child (don't know how this is different from portrait, except that it claims to bring up colours better), Sport (which adjusts the focus as you follow movement), Close-up and Night Portrait (which adjusts the aperture to get the best picture in low light conditions). It also has built-in flash and, of course, a tripod fitting.
*Menus*
I won't go into every menu here, as many are pretty standard, but a couple of particularly useful ones are correction features, which remove red-eye, alter brightness, crop the picture, etc; and one by which you tell the camera to rotate the photo in the viewfinder if you have taken it portrait style (upright) rather than landscape. Once set, it applies this rotation to all portrait style pictures until you change the setting again. You can also choose between outputting it in several file types.
Although there are a lot of choices, the default settings are pretty sensible and would produce good results on most photos, making this camera pretty good for a beginner, but with more advanced features if you want them.
*Ease of use - physical*
I find this camera is a good weight and, because of its shape, easy to hold, even with a largeish lens on (I use an 18 - 70, which is slightly longer than the usual 50mm lens). All the controls are within easy reach and, although I have arthritis in my dominant hand, I find them easy to manipulate. One point, though: I am right handed, so I don't know how easy it would be for a left handed person. The only physical drawback I find is that, when holding the camera to take a photo, it is easy to accidentally press the menu/viewscreen buttons, as they are very close to the side of the camera.
*Ease of use - settings*
I find that, although the camera has all the modes mentioned above, I tend to get better results using the totally automatic setting. For example, I took a photo of a patch of forget-me-nots, first on the fully auto setting, then on the close-up setting, and I found that the auto picture was much clearer. I think this is because on close-up mode, the camera needs one particular focal point, and flowers right across the field of view were at the same distance from the camera. In the resulting photo, one particular flower was very clear and most of the others were a little 'soft'.
In the fully automatic setting, I find the pictures consistently sharp and correctly exposed.
*My thoughts*
This camera is marketed at the consumer, rather than professional, market, and I feel that the ease of use reflects that. As I said before, the advanced features are there, but you can get excellent results without really changing any of the default settings. A feature I particularly like is that the viewscreen also acts as the menu/settings display. On a lot of cameras, the display is a standard LCD, which means black lettering/symbols on a grey background. It is also usually on top of the camera, which means it has to be pretty small, and this means a lot of information crammed closely together. On the D60, the display is black on a whiteish background, which I find much easier to read, particularly in bright sunlight. Because it is on the viewscreen, there is also more space for all the information, and Nikon have arranged it so that the more 'important' or frequently used info is larger, in the centre of the screen, and other icons are around the side. The menus are also clearly laid out in categories, and the button to navigate them is big and easy to use.
*Conclusion*
I have only had this camera for a short time, but so far I'm finding it very easy to use, with great quality results.
Summary: A great little camera, thoroughly recommended
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