Me and my wife finally got what we had wanted to buy for the past 2+ years… an SLR camera! We bought a Nikon D40 kit last weekend… OK, so it’s not even a midrange offering (in fact, it’s the lowest range SLR) but it’s a step up from our previous camera, a Fuji FinePix S620Z prosumer digicam.

The camera has been instrumental in cultivating my interest in photography. It’s got full manual controls (aperture, shutter, ISO settings, zoom, etc) and it has helped me a lot in learning all the different terms & settings involved in taking pictures. I bought it through eBay when I was studying in UK about 5 years ago. All the years of use and abuse had somehow taken a toll on it, and now the camera frequently hangs and often shuts down unexpectedly.

Even though it has a great list of features for its time, there were some things that bugged me.

• Poor low-light performance - the camera takes poor pictures in low-light conditions, even when bumping up the ISO to 800.
• Slow focus - the lack of an AF-assist lamp makes it hard to focus in dark areas.
• Shutter lag - there is a noticeable lag between pressing the shutter release button and the camera actually taking a snap. This proved quite frustrating when taking pictures of moving subjects, and babies. Babies couldn’t keep the same expression for a nanosecond, so the funny & cute face that the baby just made turns into a snarl when viewed in the viewfinder.

There are a few other things that I learned to live with. But then sometimes last year, a friend of mine who runs his own photography business loaned me his Nikon D70 and several lenses. I have been assisting him in some jobs for quite a while and I started to use SLRs more. And thus our quest for an SLR begins.

We got the D40 kit for RM1690 at a shop in KL Plaza (Billion Photo or something like that). It was cheaper by a few hundred compared to other places, but after we went home and I went through the box contents and documents, I realized that the kit was cheaper because it’s a grey market import. The set was from Japan, and the warranty card is in Japanese. It was a mistake not going through the box contents at the shop. We just played around with the camera and the lens. anyway, hopefully the camera doesn’t go kaput within 1 year!