megapixel photos and 1080p Full HD videos with tack-sharp details, vibrant colors and softly blurred backgrounds. It shows the status of various shooting settings, including the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and active focus point when not in Live View mode. The more exotic cameras can find a subject's eye and focus on it directly and instantly almost 100% of the time, while the D3300 usually, but not always, finds the subject in your frame. There's also a connector for a wired remote control, a mini HDMI output, and a proprietary USB port on the left side, all covered by rubber flaps.

A brilliant way to shoot high-defintion photos and movies, it is small, lightweight, powerful, comfortable to carry around, and incredibly easy to breakdown.

And all effects except panorama (for obvious reasons) are available not just for stills, but also for movie capture. The D3300 is also very quiet and refined, which is a huge bonus compared to Nikon's pro cameras when shooting candidly. lens and a behind-glass D4S, and we spent our time at the booth checking out the new Coolpix lineup. maximum kit lens aperture doesn't allow that cross-lined AF point to operate (requires a brighter/faster lens apparently).

You get that amazing blur behind people and you can easily go from automatic to manual focus if you want to be fancy. NOTE: These images are best quality JPEGs straight out of the camera, at default settings including noise reduction and using the camera's actual base ISO (not extended ISO settings). You can access it via the quick menu, but that's far too slow for my liking, so I set the Function button to adjust ISO. With Guide mode, the Nikon D3300 is also the ideal camera to learn photography and capture your best moments. Nikon has, for example, chosen to drop the optical low-pass filter from the front of the sensor, which is excellent news as it means images will show more detail than usual.It also houses a bank of settings, accessed via the i button, that give you quick control over file format and image size, white balance, flash settings, ISO, autofocus mode, autofocus area, the metering pattern, the flash output power, and exposure compensation. The D3300 has AF-S (single and lock), AF-C (continuous), and AF-A (automatic selection between the previous two modes) autofocus.

For that premium, you get one of the highest resolution APS-C sensors on the market, a very good 1080/60p video spec, and exceptional battery life among other things.

New in the D3300, a swept panorama mode lets us hand-hold and swipe the D3300 in any of four directions to make a 180º panorama. With no built-in AF motor or aperture feeler for manual-focus lenses, it only autofocuses with AF-S and older professional AF-I lenses, same as Nikon's other cheap DSLRs. I bought this camera because I really wanted to up my photography game not only for my blog, but also so that I could look back on really great photos from my trips. Understandably on such a model, we don't get 4K video recording, but we do get the next best thing: Full HD video to 60p.