It’s my girlfriends birthday soon and I was stuck for what to buy her. Well, that is until she bitched about my decrepid digicam which is dieing a slow and painful death.

The lamp went on in my head and I decided to have a look for a new digicam as this years pressie – it’ll help her immensely since she needs to take photos for her game concepts and textures.

Off I went, scouring the web for good deals.

For a while I flitted between a couple of Fujifilm, Sony and Cannon compacts and the price was steadily going up with every "It’s nice, but this one it just that little bit nicer" comment. By now I had climbed to £180 and thought "fuck it, why don’t I just get her an entry level DSLR instead" it was only £60 more.

And so off I went, onto more researching. The Sony A200 is very nice but I couldn’t push myself to meet the asking price, the Cannons have a far better range of lenses but this is just a starter unit and she’s not gonna need them for quite some time yet.

Which left me with only one logical choice…

A Nikon D40 . I could have bought the D40X, but I figured there wasn’t really that much of a need to spend the extra cash for not a massive difference when this will be perfect for what she needs right now.

It turned up last Friday, and I had a quick little play around with it to make sure nothing broke during transit/manufacture – honest! ;) The result of which can be found on my flickr account here .

I was also nice and gave the camera to her early so she could have a play and get accustomed to it as quickly as possible. Seems I have definately picked a geeky girl to fall in love with, she was as giddy as I get when around new tech. "I’ve never owned a DSLR before in my life" she gasped with a massive grin lighting her face.

It wasn’t long before she was out snapping pics all over the place – I’ve had a quick play with it, so many options!

It seems that she has gotten the hang of it quite quickly, as you can see from a selection of pics below.



The performance of the camera is stunning – click the button and *snap* the picture is there. Low light conditions are great when you bump it up to ISO1600 and it’s ready to go within seconds of turning it on. The kit lense, while only 3x zoom still brings up a fantastic amount of detail.

Definately recommend it as a starter DSLR camera. We just need to get the hang of this manual focus malarky. ;)

Also, keep your eyes open for random pics dropping onto my flickr account because of it. Think I’m gonna need to upgrade my account to Pro if this keeps up!