The Nikon D40 DSLR has been on a multitude of top ten lists and has received numerous five-star ratings. But each camera has its quirks and some of them can be quite obvious. So Nikon D40 is no exception. They say there is no such thing as a bad camera, only bad photographers. I would like to go a little further and say that there is no such thing as a bad photographer, only good photographers using the wrong camera. So let’s be a little critical of the D40 SLR and see if it really is the right camera for you.

The most obvious shortcoming of the Nikon D40 camera is the absence of an autofocus controller on the camera body. What this means is that if autofocus is important to the way you take pictures, you’re somewhat limited in the number of lenses you can use with the D40. Only about ten percent of the lenses available for the Nikon D40 have autofocus units built into the lenses. Needless to say, those lenses are considerably more expensive than non-autofocus lenses (over $500+). Autofocus would be important for anyone who takes pictures with a lot of movement, such as sports or wildlife.

Nikon decided that the depth-of-field preview feature was not necessary for the D40. Depending on your preference for taking pictures, this may or may not be a cause for concern. Some photographers find this very useful, but others may simply 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 teach the principles of objects in focus and out of focus.

One last little complaint. Most SLRs in this price range allow you to shoot in RAW format, and the D40 is no exception. What’s a bit surprising is that when shooting RAW and JPEG 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 shoot is just RAW, or just images in JPEG format, then don’t worry about this issue.