For this review, I took a few photos for comparison with the D40 and the D70. I set up a tripod roughly 80 inches from our Christmas tree and cycled through the zoom levels on each lens. I set both cameras to auto mode, allowing each camera to take the picture as it wishes, which for both cameras meant automatically popping up their flashes and taking control of aperture and ISO equivalent settings. Because there is currently no way to open the raw NEF files from the D40 in Photoshop, I set both cameras to write jpg files at the “fine” setting. So really, what we have, is the typical user settings. So enough with the talk eh? Lets take a look at the photos.

Because of differences in the lenses, I had to settle for close enough to the same. The zoomed in photos will be at 50mm for the D40 and 55mm for the D70. The other photos are both at 35mm. For the photos, the D40 decided that an ISO equivalent of 400 was good, while the 70 chose to shoot at 200. Both cameras went with 1/60s shutter speeds. Below is the D40 shooting at 35mm, f/4.8.

The next photo is the D70 at the same distance and focal length which ended up shooting at f/4.2

As you can see the exposure is a bit more washed out on the D40, but not enough so that the picture looks bad. The D70 is a bit darker and subsequently you could bring more out in Photoshop, but to snap a pic and dump to print I think the D40 might be the better choice. Lets zoom in and take a look.

The D40 at 50mm f/5.6 still looks pretty good. As does the D70 at 55mm f/4.5(below). The D40 still ends up a little washed out, but I’m not a fan of flash on camera anyway, and will always try to shoot without flash first. If you have to use a flash, diffuse it, or better yet use a flash like the SB-800 so you can reflect it of the ceiling or wall to keep your image from showing signs of harsh shadow and flattening of detail.

The following are cropped from the original size jpegs at 100%. I still needed to re-size them to make them fit in this blog’s framework. It should however, show the detail available from a mere 6.1 megapixels. Again, the D40 followed by the D70, crops taken from the center of the focal area.

Both of these are from the 50/55mm pictures taken roughly 7ft away at night under typical lighting conditions. (That means no strobes, and no extra lighting for these pictures. With just a little more detail you would be able to tell from the two whit stripes on the bottom of the needles that that indeed is a Balsam Fir. These final two are from upper left corners of the image. Note the D40 stays sharp, where the D70 does not. Now this is most likely due to aperture or something, and if I had bothered to manually set stuff it probably wouldn’t happen. However, except for using a tripod for control of distance and subject, I’m shooting these as a general user would.

Now I know it’s hard to tell from 400px wide images, so go get yourself a look at the directories with the original photos. The D40 here and the D70 here. For fun, you can find two photos from Ye Olde Coolpix as well. They are less then impressive.

I uploaded the full-size photos with no resizing in these directories, so make sure when you look at one individually click on the link (3008×2000) to see the full size image. So what does this all add up to? When I printed basic quality jpegs from the D70 (I was shooting in Raw+Basic) I was able to take those basic quality jpgs pop them directly into my father’s Epson r500 and print them up with AMAZING quality. The same should be the case with the 40, but I have not yet had an event worth printing from. My friends in photo say that a 6.1 megapixels should be able to easily print up to 20″ without having to first run any fractal software, and even larger with some processing. So who out there (besides the occasional great shot, or pros) is printing larger then 8×10? If your the average user, forget chasing megapixels and go with a camera that you can afford and spend your hard earned money on more glass and a good flash for your camera. But don’t take it from me, read “The Megapixel Myth” article written by a pro.

One of the interesting features of the D40 is it’s display of settings like shutter speed and aperture. Above you can see a close-up of the screen. For the photo, I set the camera into aperture priority mode. This means I can set how much light is allowed in through the lens. The left concentric circles both illustrate the shutter speed and aperture. In the outer circle we see the shutter speed and in the inner circle we see how open the aperture is. In the picture below, I closed the aperture up and it will help illustrate how the display changes.

As we can see, when we allow the camera to control everything except the aperture, it automatically adjusts the shutter speed, and thus the display shows a graphical representation of the settings. This isn’t the only time the camera helps you out. With a simple push of the help button, it will explain what a setting is, what the mode means, or even prompt you if the current settings might result in an underexposed image.

What you see in these few pictures is a small portion of help that can and will be displayed at a push of a button. There’s a lot more to find, and as I work more with the camera I’ll keep you posted on anything of interest. Next time, I’ll discuss the real truth about mega-pixels, and why 6.1megapixels is more then enough for 80% of people. I’ll also share some photos as examples that simulate real world scenarios for those of us without fancy lighting equipment.

Let me start off by saying, I am not a professional photographer. Or for some of you, that’s request.getParameter(“Mike”) != “Pro Photographer”. (BTW, I know that’s not a correct string comparison, so don’t write me.) In college I majored in New Media, with a focus in web development. That offered me the unique opportunity to experience classes in art, photography, digital video and of course web development. In my photojournalism I learned the basics, flash on camera is bad, mmmkay (w/ exceptions like fill flash), fill the frame, etc. But when it comes to photography, at this stage in the game, I’m a prosumer. Granted I have my coworkers in photo services at my disposal for questions, which puts me at an unfair advantage to most. But the prosumer angle is the angle I’m taking when I write anything about my camera, it’s ease of use, or it’s picture quality.

The D40 is small and light, or as one pro said, “cute.” Despite my testosterone telling me, no gadget should be declared cute, I humbly agree. It’s much smaller in size then ‘more professional’ models. At left you can see it side-by-side with a friend’s D70.

Please note however, that the D70 in question also has a larger, faster lens then the D40 with it’s kit lens. However, the body itself is still much smaller, and the kit lens is also smaller and lighter in weight, but a bit slower due to smaller diameter glass and smaller range in aperture.

Despite the D40 being smaller, it still packs a lot of punch, and offers some feature’s from it’s big brothers and sisters. For instance at right, you can see the drastically larger LCD pulled from the D80 which almost dwarfs the rest of the camera body when looking at it from behind. When looking at it from the top, you’ll also note that the status LCD, familiar to those of us that used modern film SLRs, is missing from the D40, which is a departure from the styling of the D70 and the majority of Nikon’s dSLRs. Don’t worry though, this information can be prompted to display on the LCD, and in some ways, offers the information in a much more understandable fashion. More to come on that, in a later write up.

The only drawback I find from the physical size of the camera however, is a lack of space for my pinky.

I apologize for the pics, these were taken with me holding my D40 in front of the D70 on a tripod, in an attempt to show my hand size compared to the camera body. What you can see however, is that without squeezing all my fingers together, my pinky is bumped off the camera body where it is left to it’s own devices to find a place to hang out. I don’t find this a major drawback, as I have medium size hands, but anyone with larger hands should try holding the camera for a while before buying it.

Overall, I rate it’s size as a selling point. As a prosumer, I won’t be conducting multi-hour photo shoots. I’ll be looking to be able to compactly pack this camera to go on vacations, kayaking and to family gatherings, where I don’t want a huge, heavy camera getting in the way.

In my next review, I’ll look at some of the features of the D40, including it’s built in help system and graphic representation of settings.