Nikon D50 Review

Another pleasant surprise awaits you when you lift the camera to your eye: the view is bright, crisply contrasty and looks neutral. This level of image would have done a professional camera proud a few years ago and is superb performance for any camera now. Bear in mind that the lens tested is a relatively slow f/3.5 maximum aperture at the wide end, yet even at the f/5.6 long setting, the viewfinder is a pleasure to use.

Indications in the viewfinder are surprisingly complete too, from focus confirmation to warnings of no memory card inserted and preset white balance. In between, you also get exposure settings, analogue exposure display for manual operations, exposure lock and so on. Additionally, you get indicators on the focusing screen itself of the active focusing zone.

So, it all looks good so far - but just wait until you turn the D50 on. It responds nearly instantly, leaving some current professional cameras behind in the dust. Shutter lag is very short too: not quite as brisk as top models, but entirely usable.

You'd be a very hard-working beginner if you stretched this camera's ability to fire off a series of shots. When you half-press the shutter button, the viewfinder shows how many shots you can take in a series: although the camera said nine, at times I could squeeze off a burst of ten - taking about five seconds - before it needed to take a breath. Then it needs some 25 seconds to recover fully. However, after about three seconds, the camera's ready to take another shot. In other words, this beauty is able to take pictures even as the cache or temporary memory is being emptied. This is a cracking, fully professional feature.

Other aspects of handling also deserve high praise. For example, the LCD screen is not only large and clear, it's highly responsive and able to display new images even as the most recent one is being written to memory. The menu items are large and clearly legible, but zooming into the review picture needs careful sequencing between two buttons. Autofocus performance with the 18-55mm zoom is entirely satisfactory: neither the fastest nor the slowest in this class, but working well into low light levels.

Clean performance

Images from the camera are marked by two qualities: cleanliness from noise, and good dynamic compression. This means that the images are smooth, with gradations unbroken and changing evenly from midtone to darker tones. Good dynamic compression means that it handles wide ranges of luminance well, resulting in more details showing in highlights while shadow details are also retained. This does have the side effect of making the images look slightly soft or fl at in tone, though.

In compensation, midtone contrast is good, so the overall impression of the images is very favourable. This is in part a testament to the lens too, which performs well for its class: images are well drawn, although detail could be more crisply rendered.

Overall, when you add up a camera which handles and performs well and which offers all of the essential photography controls with such a low price tag, you have a superb entry-level model. It will easily grow with increasing demands, or offer a perfect back-up for a more comprehensive outfit.