Nikon D40 Digital SLR Camera Is For…
The Nikon D40 digital SLR camera is for budget-minded photographers who are new to digital SLR photography and those who want a lighter camera to take around for short trips.
What I like about the D40 is that it has a large, bright 2.5″ LCD screen which is colourful and just right for reviewing your photos.
It provides very handy and helpful information about aperture, shutter, ISO and the like. You can set the LCD display to be one of Graphic, Classic and Wallpaper.
The Graphic mode is meant to be “helpful” but I found that it was quite distracting.
I prefer to use the Classic look as it provides the most information in the cleanest possible way. In the Classic mode, the display information is large, clear and easy to read.
In the Graphic mode, most of the important information such as shutter, aperture and ISO are smaller. The reason for this is to use a graphic to represent the aperture size.
Wallpaper displays the same small information as the Graphic mode but displays an image contained on your memory card instead.
Perhaps this graphic was intended to help those new to understanding that the smaller the f-stop number, the larger the aperture opening. However, as mentioned above, it was quite distracting to me and served no real purpose.
On the back of the camera, there are 4 buttons down the left side of the Nikon D40 LCD, a 4-way directional selector and a small button to the bottom-right of the LCD.
These buttons are (from top to bottom):
- Playback
- Menu
- Zoom out
- Zoom in/?
The number of buttons seems about right for someone coming into the dSLR world from a point-and-shoot background. Helpful, easy to navigate and easily accessible are how I would describe the buttons.
In fact, the Nikon D40 digital SLR camera functions very much like a point-and-shoot camera. By setting the dial to “Auto” mode, just take your pictures as you normally would. I am almost certain that you will be very pleased by the results!