D80: Initial Impressions

This was first posted in April 2008:

The viewfinder is small. I had read about this, but it still came as a shock to me. Before deciding on the D80, I was looking at buying D60. I am glad now that I did not, because with the D60, I would have had to manually focus my existing lenses, and given the size of the viewfinder, this would be very difficult.

Another curious thing I noticed that when I had attached my lens, initially the viewfinder appeared very dark. It seemed as if the lens was stopped down. Once I had put the battery in, and switched the camera on, the viewfinder became bright.

Update: This is documented in the manual. Apparently, the viewfinder goes dark if the battery is not inserted or if the battery charge is low. I wonder if this is because the camera needs power to keep the lens at is maximum aperture.