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Movie Mode
This week's winner for the Least Practical Feature award is the Nikon D60 Movie mode. While compact still camera users enjoy increasingly practical movie capture – at least if posting clips on YouTube is the extent of your cinematic ambition – Nikon offers a D60 "Movie mode" that entails shooting a sequence of still images, then having the camera assemble them sequentially into an AVI file. Maximum frame rate is 15 frames per second, maximum resolution is 640 x 480. The good news is, the feature does work as promised. The question is, why bother? We see two potential applications: Wallace-and-Gromit-style stop-motion movie-making, for those with inexhaustible patience and actual miniature modeling talent, or Keystone-Kops-quality clips from live action, which is moderately amusing exactly once. In the end, our reaction is less "so cool!" than "so what?" You can judge for yourself by viewing this clip which we posted for your amusement, appropriately enough, on YouTube.

Drive / Burst Mode (6.50)
Nikon says the D60 can churn out up to 3 frames per second, and we got close to that figure in our testing. The maximum number of JPEGs in continuous shutter release mode is 100 shots, regardless of resolution or compression settings. In RAW format, the buffer will fill after only six shots. The number of frames remaining before the memory buffer fills and frame rate slows is shown on the right side of the viewfinder display.

Playback Mode (9.75)
A single clearly-labeled button starts full-screen playback, beginning with the most recent shot. Toggling the four-way control up and down overlays information displays over the image, including three screens of shooting information readouts, a display revealing blown-out highlights, and a histogram.

You can zoom in up to 25x during playback, making it easy to determine the sharpness of a given image. We particularly like one innovative zoom feature: after setting the area you want magnified, you can scroll through images using the control dial, maintaining the same positioning and magnification for each sequential picture. This is a fast, convenient way to determine the best shot in a sequence.

Pressing the zoom out button brings up a multiple thumbnail image display: first four images, then nine, which can be browsed with the four-way controller and selected for full-screen display by pressing the OK button.

The D60 also provides extensive in-camera editing options, which is covered below in the Picture Quality / Size Options section.

Custom Image Presets (6.00)
As a hand-holding convenience, the D60 provides six image pre-programmed image setting combinations, accessible via the mode dial: Portrait, Landscape, Child, Sports, Close-Up, and Night Portrait. 

When we asked Nikon to explain exactly which settings are tweaked how for each of these presets, we were told the specifics are "confidential." However, the aperture/shutter speed combinations required are straightforward: boost shutter speed for fast-moving sports and children, ratchet down the aperture setting for landscapes, set flash to slow sync for night portraits. Beyond that, Nikon says auto white balance is used for all modes, and switches between the two available sRGB color spaces depending on the scene. Tone compensation and sharpening are the other two variables that change from preset to preset. Sharpening is lower for Night Portrait and Portrait modes, while Landscape and Sports modes have a higher level of sharpening to bring out fine details. Tone compensation (contrast levels) are also adjusted based on the preset.

 

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