The Nikon D60 isn’t the company’s least expensive SLR (that honor belongs to the aging 6-megapixel D40), but this is the model that’s meant to compete most aggressively in the current entry-level SLR wars. It boasts perfectly respectable stats, including 10.2-megapixel resolution, an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens image-stabilized kit lens and a fighting weight just over a pound, in a package that lists for $649.95.

The D60 looks much like every other Nikon SLR. It's made of black, matte plastic, with Nikon's trademark red triangle on the grip as the only significant visual flair. Said grip is slightly on the small side, and may be a bit cramped for those who have large hands. The D60 only has a single control dial, located on the top right of the camera's back, very close to where your thumb rests, which makes it easy to change settings on the fly.

A major benefit to shooting with a Nikon camera is having access to Nikon's substantial body of lenses. With the D40, however, the auto focus is housed in the lens rather than the body, which limits compatibility with older auto focus lenses. While they'll still fit the your camera, they’ll have to be focused manually, which gets old quickly. That said, if you're new to Nikon SLRs and not worried abou using older lenses you’ve accumulated, there’s certainly no shortage of available lenses fully compatible with the D40, from Nikon and other vendors.

One area where Nikon did skimp noticeably on the D40 is the auto focus system. Unlike the competition’s similarly priced models (like the Canon XSi or the Sony Alpha 200), the D60 only has three focal points for auto focus, arranged across the central horizontal axis. If your subject is on the move and deviates from this plane, the auto focus is going to have trouble keeping up.

As one expects from an SLR, you get a significant level  of control with the D40. ISO settings run from ISO 100 to ISO 1600, with an additional level called Hi 1, which is about equivalent to ISO 3200. For white balance, you can rely on auto, or chose Fluorescent, Direct Sunlight, Flash, Cloudy, and Shade presets, or use a white or gray card to manually set a white balance level.  There's no option to tweak the white balance presets, or to enter a color temperature value directly as you’ll find in more sophisticated SLRs. Shutter speeds run from 1/4000 to 30 seconds, a perfectly adequate range, plus Bulb mode for taking extra-long exposures.

In addition to a competent Auto exposure mode, Nikon has made a number of small concessions to users inexperienced with SLRs. It has six pre-programmed image setting combinations, accessible via the mode dial: Portrait, Landscape, Child, Sports, Close-Up, and Night Portrait. It also has substantial editing controls in the camera, including resizing, retouching, filters and red-eye reduction. The ability to fiddle with your photos right in the camera has become a trademark feature of Nikon SLRs, one that will be particularly useful for those who like to take out the memory card, hand it to the smiling counter jockey in the retail photo department and have them take care of the printing chores – with the D40 you can improve the photos a bit without having to head for your computer.

Performance (read in-depth lab performance at Digitalcamerainfo.com)
We put the Nikon D60 through an extensive battery of tests, and overall it performed very well. It had a high resolution score, which means it can deliver sharply detailed images,  and it kept image noise (that annoying grainy effect you sometimes see in digital imags) low through all our tests. It didn't fare quite so well on color accuracy, especially with blues and purples, and its white balance abilities, both preset and auto, were a bit below average.

We also tested how fast the Nikon performs, and it stayed true to the manufacturer's promise of three frames per second on when set to
Continuous Release. It also took, on average, a nippy half-second to power up, but a slightly sub-par 1.7 seconds to process an image after you'd photographed.

Comparisons (read in-depth comparisons at Digitalcamerainfo.com)
The Nikon sits at slightly above entry-level for price, which means that it's flanked by both less expensive models that are a bit less feature-rich, and  more sophisticated, more expensive SLRs. In the first category, you have the Nikon D40, which only shoots 6.1-megapixels, and is substantially slower.  If you're not loyal to Nikon already, you also have the Canon XS and Sony Alpha 200, both of which are very competent and affordable cameras. On the more expensive side, you have the Nikon D300, which costs around $1500 sans lens, but is faster, better built, and has a much wider feature set. At a similar price point to the D60, but from the competition, is the Canon XSi, which slightly out-performed the Nikon in our tests and is marginally less expensive. If you already have a brand loyalty to either Canon or Nikon, it's probably wisest to stick with the company with whom you already own gear; but if you're new to SLRs, both make excellent choices.