Though I'm not crazy about the Nikon D5000's swivel screen design, it's still nice to have on an SLR, and works pretty well in handheld shooting situations, for both video and stills. Nerd sites and specs can't tell you this, but try to go out and shoot them, and with Canon, it's tougher to get the camera to go. The Nikon D5000's LCD screen appears to have a roughly 4:3 dimension, but the frame is built larger, to hold a wider and slightly taller screen, suggesting that we may see this same assembly on future Nikon digital SLRs, perhaps with a 3:2 screen. Unlike other recent digital SLRs from Nikon, though, the Nikon D5000 has a more standard-resolution, 230,000 dot display, rather than the 920K-dot displays included on the D90 and other recent Nikon pro digital SLR cameras. When taking still shots, the camera offers four types of contrast AF (wide area, normal area, face detection and new subject tracking) to make capture as easy as possible.

It's like pianos: a 9-foot Bösendorfer may be better piano than the upright at the local bar, but if you can't play the piano, you won't get good music out of any of them. Other SLR makers, notably Olympus, Sony, and Panasonic have included articulating screens, but usually for more money, and without Movie mode. We've assembled a few of our favorite articles, tutorials, explainers, and guides to help beginners get started with photography and level up to advanced concepts. That enables onscreen effects that you generally only find on higher-end Nikon SLRs, like the hairline grid that you can activate, the low-battery indicator, the "No memory card" warning, or the LCD/LED illuminated AF points that you see at right.Remember to set CFN d4 to ON so your files start at the last number you shot so you'll not have duplicate file numbers on your hard drive. Nikon continues to push the edges of digital SLR camera design, not only adding features, but consistently improving image quality. This articulated screen is one of the few true novelties the D5000 offers over previous Nikon DSLRs.

It's not a big loss, though, because you have to edit out the T1i's focusing efforts, which often include significant changes to the exposure as well as focus when autofocusing; I'd prefer not to have to cut them out later in the editing program. Can be used in mode M, but exposure meter does not function; electronic range finder can be used if maximum aperture is f/5. Curiously, matrix metering proved somewhat less accurate than with the D90, prompting us to use exposure compensation much more often - despite the fact that the two cameras use essentially the same metering system. The Nikon D5000 ships with an updated version of the battery used by the Nikon D40 and D60, the EN-EL9a, a 7. There is some evidence of lost data in the Rebel T1i, especially in the curls of the letter A in the Mas Portel bottle above.

The recent boom in DSLR sales has seen all the major manufacturers adding bulked-up or stripped-down entry level models, repositioning their offerings to make sure that anyone willing to put up with the size and weight of a DSLR will look at one of their models. As with all digital SLRs so far, the Nikon D5000 is better for capturing video snapshots that you can string together in a video editor, rather than longer recordings, because the camera can't autofocus while you record. The D90 has significantly better utility than the D40, D40x, D60 and D5000 because the D90 adds many more direct control knobs and buttons to get to its extra features, while the D5000 and D40 share the same lack of buttons and rely more on menus for many settings, like ISO or White Balance. With practice, performing adjustments via this screen becomes fairly quick and easy, but it's still not as efficient as the D90's dedicated controls. The technical reason this happens is because for some reason half the D5000 still thinks its in SHOOT mode when the image pops up on the back screen after shooting it, so its reading your dial changes as exposure input, not playback input.

The Nikon D5000's mode dial is packed, featuring one extra position for SCENE mode, which opens up 13 additional Scene modes. The D5000, like the D40, D40x and D60, lacks most of the D90's extra control buttons that make the D90 such a masterpiece. The Canon EOS 500D, the Olympus E-620 and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1 each have their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, therefore we recommend that you check out our reviews of those cameras too, before making a purchase. The left side also has a relief for the palm, making it easier to cradle the camera while extending your fingers to turn the zoom and focus rings.

In other words, the bottom placing of the hinge wasn't the most brilliant idea, as it's more limiting than the left-hinged solution, but it's still more flexible than a simple tilting screen (and much more useful than a fixed LCD). The invaluable Recent Settings Menu usually lets me find the item quickly so I can disable it and resume shooting. And its into this maelstrom of DSLR proliferation that Nikon launches its latest baby DSLR, the D5000.

After you take a picture and an image pops on the screen, if you spin the dial to get to other images as you can do on other Nikons, instead of changing to the other pictures, the D5000 accidentally interprets that input as thinking you want to change your exposure settings. Announced in April 2009, it’s the successor to the popular D60 and while externally resembling its predecessor, it inherits many key aspects of the higher-end D90 including its sensor with Live View and HD movie recording.This, however, introduces some shutter lag, which usually isn't worth the few decibels of difference versus what is already an impressively quiet shutter (Nikon recommends using the Quiet mode for taking pictures of sleeping babies, a situation in which a bit of shutter delay isn't a problem). When I first shot it, I noticed how quiet it was, and a week later when I found the D5000's Quiet Mode, I was astounded!