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Nikon D3500 24.2MP DSLR Camera + AF-P DX 18-55mm VR NIKKOR Lens Kit + TRD ® 20 Piece Digital Essential Kit

£9.9£99Clearance
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In viewfinder shooting, the 11 AF points are clustered towards the middle of the frame, but if your subject is near the edge it’s easy enough to focus and then reframe before shooting. You can let the camera choose the focus point automatically or select it yourself; either way it’s very fast, and very positive. Picture Control modes can be directly accessed via a dedicated button and allow you to set predefined looks to imagery in-camera, and include Flat, Landscape, Monochrome, Neutral, Portrait, Standard, Vivid, and user-customizable settings.

Ultimately the D3500 is a very capable and affordable camera for beginners and young families. It does a fine job capturing 'candids' and other casual shots. Although the Guide Mode leaves something to be desired for seasoned shooters, it does offer a non-intimidating way to learn about some of the more technical aspects of photography. If you shoot in low light/low contrast, you need a camera able to handle high ISO, if you shoot in fierce light and high contrast you probably need a camera with a huge dynamic range.

A superb budget DSLR that’s tailor-made for beginners, but it’s not a huge improvement on the D3400

The Nikon SnapBridge application must be installedon a compatible smart device before it can be used with this camera. The D3500's live view autofocus is much faster and more responsive than we'd expect from a simple contrast-based AF system. Modes Auto, Incandescent, Fluorescent (7 Types), Direct Sunlight, Flash, Cloudy, Shade, Preset Manual, All Except Preset Manual with Fine-tuning Usability for beginners is straightforward: point the camera at a subject, doink the red button and the camera does the rest. If you want more control over your footage – shutter and aperture, for example – you need to enable the camera’s “Manual movie settings”. This allows you to control exposure when shooting movies but, annoyingly, prevents you from changing the aperture setting in live view mode.

Keep the ISO under control and the camera’s image quality is only limited by the lens you attach. Colours were always accurate and, natch, you can always opt to shoot RAW files to gouge the maximum from your files in post-production.

Questions and answers of the customers

We might scoff at the D3500’s relatively small weight reduction compared to the D3400, but in truth its out-of-the-box weight of just 415g is actually really impressive. It’s only 124mm wide, which means in all it’s not that different in the hand – or on the shoulder – as many mirrorless cameras. It’s a major thinking point for those who hold the opinion that mirrorless cameras have sounded a death knell for the DSLR. A range of Special Effects are available to creatively refine the look of imagery in-camera, and include Night Vision, Super Vivid, Pop, Photo Illustration, Toy Camera Effect, Miniature Effect, Selective Color, Silhouette, High Key, and Low Key. The AF does a fine job when you have a static subject, but with something fast moving you will probably have to learn to pre-focus at the point you expect the subject to arrive at, which may require some trial-and-error. The camera's 'Guide' mode tries to help teach you the camera's functions and how to get the most out of it. We spent time with the D3500 around Brooklyn with the standard 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR kit lens and an additional 35mm f/1.8G DX Nikkor lens. What’s new?

Nikon does not use on-sensor phase-detection autofocus in its DSLRs, relying on slower contrast-based autofocus instead. Or at least it should be slow. But somewhere along the line Nikon has found a way to make the D3500’s live view AF feel almost as responsive as a mirrorless camera’s, and we think it’s down to the AF-P autofocus technology in its kit lens. The D3500 isn’t just Nikon’s cheapest and simplest DSLR, it’s also its lightest, weighing just 415g, body only, and that’s with the battery and a memory card. It will usually come with a lightweight 18-55mm AF-P kit lens which has a retracting mechanism to make it more portable when it’s not switched on. It’s not quite as small as a mirrorless camera, but the battery life alone makes a good case for the classic DSLR design, and the D3500 but is light, fast enough and cheap enough to make a great travel camera. Most importantly, buying into a future-proof system, where a more professional camera (like an X-T3) is not necessarily much larger and heavier. The Fujifilm X-T100 easily wins for dynamic range in our lab tests, with the Canon EOS Rebel T7/2000D in second place and the Nikon D3500 and Sony A68 very slightly behind. Verdict those folks claiming the D3500 is "crap" are more than the freak of the week, this is really jerko BS talk. One who can't make decent pictures with the D3500, can't make any good compositions with any camera, period.

The Nikon D3500 isn't just one of the best entry-level DSLRs you can buy, it's also one of the cheapest – it's an evergreen classic

ISO performance is very good. The range from ISO 100-800 produced test images that were more or less indistinguishable from each other, and noise at ISO 1600 was pretty nicely controlled – certainly well enough to expect good quality prints. Beyond ISO 1600 things inevitably got muddier, with ISO 6400 probably being the usable maximum. ISOs 12,800 and 25,600 are effectively party-pieces – for emergency only. It was while we were shooting our test ISO images, incidentally, that we re-discovered one of Nikon’s more annoying bugbears: set the self-timer, shoot an image, and the camera resets to burst mode after the image is taken.

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