Nikon D3200 Digital SLR Camera with 18-55mm VR Lens Kit - Black (24.2MP) 3 inch LCD

I've used Nikon cameras since the Nikon F back in the 60s. I used Nikon cameras as a professional photographer right up to the F4S when I retired. I sold all my film stuff and bought a D70 and soon changed to a D90 which I used up to yesterday.

Then the D3200 arrived and, for the price, it is awesome. You can cut a small piece out of the centre of a photo and enlarge it and it looks like full frame. That is where this camera comes into its own. With its 24 Megapixel CMOS sensor it leaves everything except the D800 (£2900.00) way behind.

I've heard it said that anything over 12 Megapixels doesn't really matter. Well this camera gives the lie to the statement. It makes a hell of a difference.

It also takes superb 1080p videos and will auto focus while doing so, something the the D90 wouldn't do. Another improvement on the D90 is the fact that it has infra red remote release windows on the back as well as the front. I thought it was a bit silly for the D90 to only have one on the front which is where you are least likely to use it.

A word of warning though. If you already have a Nikon digital camera, then you probably have the Nikon View NX2 software. This camera comes with the latest View NX2 software but do not overwrite the old software. I did and then found that I couldn't open the RAW (NEF) files from the D3200. The way to do it is to uninstall the old software before you install the new. Then it works perfectly.

If you purchase this camera get yourself a big SDHD card as the file sizes are huge. Shooting in RAW (which I always do) you'll get 259 exposures on an 8 Gig card. So my next purchase will be a 32 Gig card. Amazon do a Sandisc Ultra 32 Gig card at £17.77; a very good price.

It's a pity there are only five stars as I would like to have given this camera 10.

I've now used this camera for a few weeks and it is amazing. Having read some of the bad reviews, I've come to the conclusion that the reviewers don't have the camera. I did a series of test shots today from ISO100 to ISDO12800 and the results were staggering. You can see the shots here: [...]

This first part is a preliminary review, intended to convey my initial impressions of the camera.

1) BUILD QUALITY
The camera is assembled in Thailand. Its exterior bodywork looks to be made either from polycarbonate, or from some form of GRP (a durable kind of plastic, re-inforced with glass-fibre threads); the inner chassis is made of steel. The camera doesn't seem to bend or creak - even with a heavy lens attached - and the various switchgear all works positively enough. You will need to take a little extra care when operating the pop-up flash, or when opening and closing the covers to the battery compartment and accessory ports (in other words, with all the usual suspects); but in this respect, the D3200 is no better or worse than many of its rivals. Amateurs/enthusiasts need have no worries about the overall build quality, I believe. As for some of the ancillary bits and pieces...read my later update!

2) THE VIEWFINDER
The D3200 is small - smaller than you might expect. Understandably, then, its mirror, its pentamirror (a cheaper and simpler contraption than the normal pentaprism), and its viewfinder eyepiece, are altogether a little bit more compact than might be desired. On the other hand, it does benefit from some degree of built-in dioptric correction: a welcome bonus! As a visual aid to composition, the viewfinder image is perfectly acceptable with the F2.8 lens that I use (more later); but I suspect that - on dull days, with a slower lens - the image directed to the eye might well become a little too dark for some. Of more immediate concern to me is the viewfinder's information display, which always seems poorly illuminated and just becomes increasingly harder to read in bright conditions.

3) THE LCD MONITOR SCREEN
With its 921K dot display, the D3200's rear screen provides clear and detailed images most of the time - except in spells of the brightest sunshine, as you might expect. It doesn't articulate, which is a disadvantage when it comes to tackling those awkward high and low level shots, or for those wanting to use the D3200 as a video camera; but I suppose it would only have bumped up the purchase price. You need to realise, however, that the rear screen being used here is bonded directly to the camera (as it is with the D600 and D800.) Should you accidentally damage or somehow permanently disable the screen, the only available remedy is for Nikon to replace the entire camera backplate - and that sounds expensive to me! It would therefore be a sensible precaution to fit a sturdy screen protector at the earliest opportunity!

4) THE ABSENCE OF CERTAIN 'ESSENTIAL' CONTROLS/FUNCTIONS
Well, some things are missing from the camera's general specification, that's true - for example, auto-bracketing. I'm getting on a bit now, and I learned my photography using 35mm film SLRs: I find that I can manage perfectly well without AB (it's easy enough to bracket exposures manually, after all); but I suspect that some will really miss it, and others will consider its omission quite unforgiveable! As a landscape photographer, I find that I really miss having the means of previewing Depth of Field... But remember this: Nikon intends the D3200 to be an entry-level DSLR, pitched to the market at a certain price. Was Nikon wrong to dispense with a few of the 'bells and whistles' in order to deliver a camera, at this price, with the performance promised by that 24MP sensor...?

5) THE SIZE OF THE IMAGE FILES
They will be large. The handbook suggests the following averages:

JPEG (Fine/Large): 11.9MB (up to 509 images on an 8GB SDHC card)
RAW(NEF)*: 20.4MB (up to 259 images on an 8GB SDHC card)
JPEG (Fine/Large) + RAW (NEF)*: 31.9MB (up to 171 combined images on an 8GB SDHC card)

[* Adobe patrons will require at least ACR (RAW) 7.1 to read and process the D3200's NEF files]

Keen photographers are going to need a 16GB or 32GB SDHC card (the camera will also accept SDXC cards up to 64GB); and it will have to be UHS-1 if they intend to shoot RAW at 4FPS!

One final word on file sizes. I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 (Mac/PC) to develop and convert copies of the proprietary RAW (NEF) files into 16-bit TIFF files - primarily, to maximize print quality. If you propose to do the same, you need to be aware that the resulting files will be very much larger than their originators - in fact, about 140MB EACH!!

6) THE 'STANDARD' LENS
Every major media review or report you care to read will say the same thing: the Nikkor 18-55mm F3.5 - F5.6G VR is a good performer as far as kit zooms go, but it's not good enough to bring the best out of the D3200's sensor. This statement isn't intended to deprecate those who may already own this lens, and nor should it be taken for an arbitrary piece of 'lens snobbery'; it's merely an objective reiteration of general opinion, that's all.

If you're only looking to buy a fairly uncomplicated camera, complete with its standard zoom lens - and you never want to take your photography any further than that - then I would suggest you'd probably be better served by a Canon 1100D or a Nikon D3100: the performance capabilities of their sensors are likely to be more in tune with the characteristics of these types of general-purpose lenses. Furthermore, I'm not one of those people who subscribes to the idea that you buy a basic kit lens to 'learn the ropes', then discard it and move on to something better: if you understand - from the outset - that a particular lens is ultimately not going to deliver the goods, then why buy it in the first place...? Let me put it this way: owning a D3200 is analogous to having a Ford Fiesta with a V8 engine under its bonnet. Restricting yourself, solely, to the use of that kit zoom lens would be like denying yourself half of the available cylinders and horse-power!

Personally, I needed a good quality zoom lens for my own particular brand of landscape/opportunistic photography, and it eventually came down to a choice between the Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR Lens and the Sigma 17-50mm f2.8 EX DC HSM Optical Stabilised lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras with APS-C Sensors. The Nikkor lens probably has a slight edge optically and also has a longer zoom range; but I just felt that a maximum aperture of F5.6 - at the tele end - was just too restrictive for use in the UK, where bright sunny days are somewhat few and far between! So it was the Sigma I went for, and it seems to operate well enough with the D3200. Yes - it's a bit soft wide open at the 17mm end (usefully, Adobe Lightroom 4 includes a specific correction profile for this lens, which makes it easy to compensate for distortion and vignetting); but things improve markedly as you stop the lens down, and having a constant F2.8 maximum aperture throughtout the zoom range is something that soon proves its worth! (Incidentally, I think that the OP/TECH E-Z Grip Hand Strap - Black is a better option than a conventional neck strap for this combination of camera and lens; and the whole ensemble fits very snugly into a Kata Camera Holster for DSLR with 16-35 Lens - Black.

These, then, are my provisional observations and conclusions. Alas, the dire state of the weather in my part of the world is currently preventing me from really putting the camera through its paces, but early test shots look very promising indeed: there's probably not the ultimate degree of image quality you would expect to get from a Sony Nex 7, which almost certainly uses the same sensor chip (blame the D3200's more aggressive low-pass filter for that!); but the images still appear sharp with masses of detail, and the colours are pleasantly bright and vibrant. The potential is clearly there, and I look forward to updating my review in due course.

++++ UPDATE 31/10/12 ++++

The story so far...

Paradoxically, the D3200 doesn't appear to deliver the highest standards of out-of-camera images you might expect of an entry-level DSLR - not straightforwardly, anyway - and certainly not in JPEG mode, when left to its own devices; but there again, how many entry-level cameras are there with a 24MP sensor - and the processing requirements that entails...? My results to date suggest that a combination of shooting RAW (NEF) and diligent processing is the only way to go if you really want to extract the maximum performance from this camera - and that means getting yourself some efficient photo-editing software.

I would also make the following observations and suggestions:

1) COLO(U)R SPACE (accessed from the Shooting Menu)
This is something reviewers rarely mention, but it fundamentally dictates the way in which the camera receives and records its sensor's chromatic data - and that has clear implications for the tonality of monochrome conversions, too. The D3200 has two available settings: sRGB, and AdobeRGB. If you don't use proprietary Adobe products, it might seem natural enough for you to keep your camera set to sRGB...but that would be quite wrong! Choose the AdobeRGB setting, instead, and you will expand the range of colours (the 'gamut') that your camera will then be able to respond to and record; and don't be too concerned about compatability as most third party editing/printing systems recognise and support the AdobeRGB standard. Read more ›

As a Nikon F and Nikon F6 user of many years, I endorse all the positive things that the other reviewers have said about the D3200.
By all means, pay the £2800 for the D800 or £1800 for the D700, but you won't get a more technically advanced processor and sensor than on the D3200. So unless you need to use the camera as a professional - huindreds of shots a day and heavy manual use in hard working situations - spend less on this camera! All electronic products are poor investments anyway! Some years ago I paid £1400 for a new Nikon F4 body. Six months alter, the same technical spec. came out in the F300 - 400 series, but in less 'durable' bodies for £300 ! Learn the lesson the easy way!
NOTE : THIS CAMERA CAN BE PURCHASED THROUGH AMAZON De. FOR £460 ! Post & packing are £5, delivery is 3 - 4 days. That's where I got mine. The camera has the same Nikon Eu guarrantee as if it had been purchased in the UK.