Nikon D40X

Out of the box, the body of the D40X felt comparatively light at 522g. Of course, considering that the body is missing quite a few essentials like an autofocus mechanism, it had better be light!

The camera's physical dimensions and appearance is exactly the same as the previously released (and reviewed) Nikon D40. The only thing that differentiates the two is the labeling. Of course, there are quite a few significant changes in the camera's performance, but we'll cover that in a bit. The thing I was concerned with is that the hand-grip, though comfortable, wasn't large enough to fit my whole hand, and the camera still had just a single jog dial for shutter speed and aperture size. Grr!

Considering that the D40X is one of the cheapest new D-SLRs available in the market, features such as dual LCD display, image stabilization and sensor cleaning are lacking, but it does have a few improvements to make it a better purchase over the D40. Firstly the resolution has been increased to 10.2 megapixels, which brings it closer to the times over the 6 megapixel resolution of the D40. The three-point autofocus unfortunately remains the same though.

The second most significant improvement is its speed of 3FPS in burst mode, over the 2.5 FPS in the D40. Other improvements include a longer-lasting battery and a wider ISO sensitivity of 100 to 1600.