cars master zone: NIKON D3000 Point and shoot

Here in kit with the Nikkor 18-55mm VR

Nikon D3000: Nikon’s entry-level from late September

The Nikon D3000 will be the less-than-500€ digital SLR of Nikon’s range. It replaces the D60 which now leaves the range - so those of you who want to buy a really affordable SLR should be able to find nice deals, with the remaining stocks of the D60 on sale at the moment. But the mission of the D3000 is to seduce a very large number of former users of compacts who are now disappointed by the image quality that can be expected from digital cameras today.

Those switchers, wooed by all manufacturers (Lumix G range for Panasonic, Olympus Pen E1, Pentax K-m, Sony Alpha 330, Canon EOS 1000D....) are the main target of the D3000 which will offer them a guide for better and easier photography as well as a technological offer much more advanced than what the D60 had to offer, an interesting Nikon but which was largely behind what competitors had on offer.

11-point AF

The main difference with the D60 is about the autofocus of the D3000: the former only had 3 collimators, an out-of-date system. Much more up-to-date in terms of technologies, the D3000 is equipped with the very serious 11-point autofocus system and with dynamic 3D tracking (420 zones), which equipped the D90, an advanced SLR for real amateurs.

The Nikon D3000 is an SLR of course, but rather compact

Guide menu: it defines settings and explains them

This 10-Mpix SLR is therefore targeted at beginners: its ambition is to teach them a few notions of photography while helping them to take pictures in a better and more natural way, very simply. Therefore, the built-in guide, very easy (not to say basic) indeed asks the amateur photographers what their aim is: do you want your main subject to stand out from a blurred background, do you want to fix the subject’s movement? Etc .... Then, the camera will adjust its settings, shutter speed, diaphragm aperture... so that the photographer can learn a little the basic rules of photo with simple words: no more "depth of field", the D3000 mentions a blurred background! That’s concrete stuff.

Retouching menu: miniature effect, coloring....

No video here, as this is a first-price product, no articulated screen either, as these are features of the elder brother, the D5000, announced recently and of which the D3000 takes its body and general ergonomics. This camera for newcomers in the SLR world however offers a 3"-screen, a rhythm of continuous shooting of 3 fps, a rather fun retouching menu with effects such as blur, coloring, miniature...., and access to Nikon’s Picture Control to personalize the rendering of one’s photos and export one’s preferences on another camera.