To Buy or Not To Buy: Nikon D40 Digital SLR Camera

To Buy or Not To Buy: Nikon D40 Digital SLR Camera
by Chris Campbell

The Nikon D40 Digital SLR Camera has been on a multitude of top ten lists and received numerous five star ratings. But, every camera has it's quirks and some of them can be quite glaring. Then Nikon D40 is no exception. They say there's no such thing as a bad camera, only bad photographers. I'd like to take that a bit further, and say that there's no such thing as a bad photographer, only good photographers using the wrong camera. So, let's be a little critical with the D40 SLR, and see if it's really the right camera for you.

The most obvious shortcoming of the Nikon D40 camera, is the absence of an autofocus driver in the camera body. What this means, is that if autofocus is important to the way you take pictures, they you are somewhat limited in the number of lenses you can use with the D40. Only about ten percent of the available lenses for the Nikon D40 have autofocus drives built into the lenses. Needless to say, those lenses are considerably more expensive than lenses without autofocus (upwards of $500 or more). Autofocus would be important to anyone shooting shots with lots of movement, such as sports or wildlife.

Nikon decided that a depth of field preview feature was not necessary for the D40. Depending on your preference for taking pictures, this may or may not be of concern. Some photographers find this very helpful, but others may just experiment with different aperture settings and figure out from that what stays in focus, and what doesn't. I would suggest, that someone learning photography could really benefit from a depth of field preview as it helps to teach the principles of objects in focus and defocused.

One last small grievance. Most SLR's in this price range, allow you to take pictures in the RAW format, and the D40 is no exception. What is a bit surprising, is that when you take pictures with the RAW and JPEG format at the same time, the D40 only uses a very basic JPEG format. For a camera in this price range I would have expected better. Again, your photo taking preferences come into play here. If all you ever take is only RAW, or only JPEG format pictures, then don't concern yourself with this issue.

So, at this point you may still be convinced that the Nikon D40 SLR is still the best camera for you. That's fine, like I said earlier, it really depends on what is the right camera for you. It's hard to beat a good photographer with the right camera.