Stu,
I recently purchased an N60 and am very happy with it. I had previously
used a Minolta SRT 200, and had not been doing photography for several
years. The N60 has turned out to be a nice way for me to get back into the
swing of things. The LCD and so forth were a shock at first, but I quickly
got over that! I'm having very good luck with exposures (print film only,
so far), the only problems are with me not always knowing when to
compensate in one way or the other. The pop-up flash is nice for candids,
and the AF is fast enough and good enough for my purposes at the moment. I
also like the vertical grip and the placement of the controls, although I
don't know how these will fit smaller hands.
Using the N60 has really given me the photo bug, and I expect to purchase a
more sophisticated body in a year or so. I think Nikon did a good job at
creating nice beginner's SLR, i.e. a body that is simple to operate but
that still has a decent feature set.
Having said that, there are a few things I miss on the N60:
1) No way to manually set ISO (folks on the list: I know ways around this
already, no need to respond).
2) No DOF preview (yup, I've tried the loosening the lens trick--it makes
me nervous)
3) No way to use a cable release.
I had all of these features on my poor old manual. I knew they weren't
there when I bought the N60, but I still miss them.
It is for these features and some others that I expect to upgrade at some
point. Also note that the N60 will not auto-focus the AF-S and AF-I
lenses. It sounds like this is probably not an issue, though.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask me any questions.
Cheers,
Barton
