All of the buzz from Nikon lately has been over its latest digital SLR, the Nikon D80. But one of the D80's predecessor, the D70, is still far from obsolete, and may be a great deal for amateur photographers on a budget.

Both the D70, and slightly newer D50, have a 6.1-megapixel Nikon DX CCD image sensor. Though far from the highest resolution available, the sensor can still produce 3,008 x 2,000-pixel images, which is usually good enough for large high quality prints.

The D70 has a good shutter speed range of 30 to 1/8000 seconds (as low as 1/500 seconds with flash). The camera can also capture 144 photos continuously at up to 3 fps.


The D70 is a versatile camera, appropriate both for beginners and advanced amateur photographers. For the beginner, the camera has several preset camera modes, including Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Close Up, Sports, Night Landscape, and Night Portrait. The Nikon D70 also has a digital vari-program that automatically selects the white balance, sharpening, tone (contrast), color, saturation and hue settings required to produce the best results.