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Story and Photography: Will Sabel Courtney

Here in the products section of 0-60mag.com, we’ll be periodically reviewing items related to greater car culture. In this case, a camera. If you have any requests for products you’d like to see our opinion on, just drop us a note below and we’ll see what we can do.

Much as with sports cars, for most of their existence, single-lens reflex cameras were complicated machines requiring an expert touch. Put someone inexperienced behind the controls and things could quickly turn messy; but with someone who knew what they were doing at the helm, they could do downright magnificent things.

These days, however, sports cars and SLRs alike have been thoroughly redefined thanks to the power of modern-day electronics. Thanks to enormous quantities of computer hardware crammed under the skin, today’s cars and cameras can be used quite successfully by anyone—though it still takes a skilled hand to flip off all the computers and squeeze the max out of either of them.

Nikon’s D3100 is the company’s entry-level digital SLR, and as such, it’s saddled with a tough task: be capable enough to serve the needs of photographers who know cameras like the back of their dominant hand, while still easy enough to figure out for those whose photography experience consists mainly of asking “Just push the silver button, right?” So it makes for the perfect camera for, say, an automotive journalist who’s dabbled in photography but whose last experience with SLR cameras dates back to a high school photo class…back in the days when people said “camera,” the first thought was of a roll of film, not a memory card. And who has two thumbs and fits the bill? Your humble author.

First impression? The D3100 feels expensive. Solid. It feels like real hardware, built carefully from high-class materials—not some chintzy plastic and aluminum amalgam. It feels like technology used to feel, before electronics were reduced to the lowest common denominator and began popping up everywhere. Hold it in your hands, and you feel like you’re doing something important. Hell, the self-esteem boost it gives you could be partly responsible for the quality of the pictures this thing takes.

But that bump in confidence counts for maybe one, two percent of picture quality. The rest is all camera. Anyone coming off a point-and-shoot (such as your scribe) will find themselves slightly astounded by the pictures that show up when you plug the Nikon into your computer. Credit the 14.2 megapixel DX-format CMOS image sensor and 18-55 mm image-stabilizing NIKKOR lens, along with the camera’s EXPEED 2 image-processing engine.

Of course, if you’re in the less-experienced segment of the D3100′s target audience, you may have no idea what most of that means. That’s all right; Nikon makes it easy for those of us who lack extensive photography knowledge to take gorgeous shots with ease. Just like your friendly old point-and-shoot, it offers selectable modes to simplify shooting in tricky situations that might vex amateur shooters—there’s a mode designed for shooting landscapes at night, one for capturing fast-moving children, and so forth.

When you’re ready to get more hands on, you can manipulate the shutter speed and aperture independently, or just go to full-out manual mode and handle all the adjustments yourself. If you need some help along the way, the camera even offers a guided operation mode. And should you decide you’d rather play Marty Scorsese instead of Ansel Adams, flip a switch in back, and the D3100 will film 1080p HD video just as competently as it clicks off snapshots.

So if you’re looking to upgrade from your regular old point-and-shoot (or just in the market for a bargain-priced new digital SLR), the Nikon D3100 makes for an ideal choice. Like today’s best sports cars, it’s accessible enough that a chimpanzee could pick it up and start snapping pretty pictures, but with the flick of a few dials and switches, it can do mind-boggling things when wielded in expert hands.