piperknitsRN wrote:
I looked at cameras at Best Buy today and liked the feel of the Nikon D3100. Any thoughts or comments about this particular camera?
It's a good choice as a first move from the point-and-shoot world. I think you'd like it.
The D3100 is Nikon's starter SLR. It's got the full-Auto and PhD modes a beginner will want, but will also let you use the Program, Shutter and Aperture priority modes that a more advanced photographer will expect (as well as full manual). Any lens you buy for the D3100 can be used on any more advanced Nikon DSLR, so you won't find yourself obsoleted if you decide to get a more capable camera down the road.
Ken Rockwell has a
review of the D3100 on his website, explaining the features and pro's and con's. He says, "The Nikon D3100 is a very competent and ultra-lightweight DSLR. It is small and light, but doesn't feel dinky. It feels like the precision product it is. ... I'd get a D3100 instead of other bigger, heavier and more expensive cameras unless you have a very clear, stated reason that the D3100 won't work for you.... The D3100 becomes my first recommendation for a low-cost, high-performance DSLR"
As a starter DLSR, the D3100 lacks some features the more expensive models have, but you have to ask yourself if you need them at this point (remembering that you can always trade up later on). I have the D7000, which is Nikon's most capable consumer DSLR at this point (just below the professional D700/D3s models), so I'm speaking from that point of view.
- The biggest drawback for me is the limitation on what lenses can be used - but that is mostly because I already have a large collection of lenses. To explain, Nikon lenses come in three basic flavors - those with built-in focus motors (AF-S), those which need a focus motor in the body (AF), and manual lenses which don't autofocus and lack a chip in the lens to feed back information to the camera.
- The D3100 has no focus motor, so it can only autofocus with lenses having internal focus motors, and its exposure meter needs the feedback from the chip in the lens, so it works with autofocus lenses of either type but not manual lenses.
- In contrast, the D90 can meter and autofocus with any autofocus lens, but still needs the chip feedback.
- The D7000 or D300 (and up) models can meter with all three types of lenses and autofocus with either type of AF lens.
- This is a bigger concern if you already had lenses which are incompatible with the D3100, but not being able to use some autofocus lenses might limit your choices to some extent. You can see that in the thread I referenced above about the 55mm f1.8 lens one of our forum members bought for her D5000.
- The autofocus system on more expensive Nikons is better - 39 points in the D7000, or 51 in the D300s, vs. 11 points in the D3100 - and faster and more accurate. Enough to get in your way? Probably not.
- The LCD on the back is smaller than on the D7000 and up systems (320x240 instead of 640x480). Nice, but not a Big Deal.
- The D3100 lacks an LCD on top of the camera to read out the camera settings, so you need to use the big LCD on the back, with some (minor) detriment to battery life. I like the camera-top LCD, which appears on the D90 and up models, because it's very convenient to be able to glance down and see how the camera is set - but that does also result in a bigger body. The D7000 weighs about twice as much as the D3100.
- The D3100 doesn't have a number of dedicated buttons which the larger bodies have - most of the functions are still there, but you need to work through menus. This will get in your way more down the road when you start relying on the more advanced functions, but you're probably going to want the better camera by then, anyway.
- The more expensive bodies can shoot at higher ISO's (in lower light, in other words), and would probably provide cleaner images at high ISO settings, but this is a matter of fairly subtle differences compared with older cameras.
- The D3100 can shoot at 3 frames per second in "continuous" mode, while the D7000 is more than twice as fast. But how often do you want to take more than three frames a second? I seldom use the capability. Nice to have when I want it, though.
- On the "nice to have" front, the D3100 has one memory card, while the D7000 (and up) have two, allowing for in-camera backups.
There are other things, but those are the most important in my book.
The one thing you will notice right away is picture quality. Any DSLR will take noticeably better pictures than a point-and-shoot for one simple reason - DSLRs use image sensors which are
much larger than point-and-shoot sensors. In this context, bigger is better every time (in terms of physical size, not megapixels). The small sensors used in point-and-shoots (and cell phones) may have the same number (or more) megapixels than the D3100, but when you cram those megapixels into a tiny chip you simply cannot get as sharp a picture because (a) the pixels tend to smear into each other; and (b) there's a physical limit set by the characteristics of light which limits the size of the smallest spot you can represent - and that limit is several times larger than the tiny pixels in the small sensors.
