In a perfect stroke of luck/magic, I have a new coworker, who is also the Director of a very cool wine and food event called Pinot Days. Nice – another wine and food lover in our midst. One who routinely throws parties for 4,000 friends. I’m impressed!

This is the first event I ever shot entirely with my D40x. I still have a lot to learn about this camera, but as of today, here are some of my observations.

Pros:

• The camera body is very small and light. (All of my lenses look and feel huge on the D40x. Almost all of them weigh more than the body!)
• The shutter is smooth and quiet. It makes you want to keep shooting.
• The camera feels fast.
• Images look almost as good as those form the D2X.

Cons:

• My best lenses will not focus automatically. I’m learning to manually focus my 14mm lens. This leads to a lot of squinting and too many out-of-focus shots.
• The camera is too small. Controls feel a little cramped and are definitely harder to use than those on the D2X. And eyeglass wearers may find that there is no way to use this camera without smudging their right right lens – probably related to the next con…
• Minimal eye-relief. If I wear my clip-ons over my prescription glasses, the LED information in the viewfinder sometimes disappears. To compensate, I have to press the camera hard to my eyeglasses and move the camera around to find the display. This does not help the manual focus problem at all because the little green dot you must use to focus manually is in the extreme lower-left corner of the display.
• One of the reasons the camera feels fast is because it’s saving smaller images in JPEG format vs. the RAW I’m used to shooting. There is no support for this camera ‘s RAW images in PhotoShop CS – a significant problem.

More as I get better acquainted with the D40x.