Nikon D80 Magic Lantern Guides

a few flaws but an easy to use learning and reference guide : Douglas H. Haden
Some of the value of this book lies in Nikon's lousy D80 manual. Nikon's manual is ill organized and printed in gray on toilet paper. Okay, maybe it is recycled paper.

That said, Magic Lantern/Lark Books printed the book on decent paper (except the covers curl) and with black ink. Vastly better than Nikon's manual. The photos, especially the super-close-up photos of the D80's anatomy, are very clear. The rich typography is excellent: headings are bold, bullets are well used to structure lists, captions are set off and readable, and on and on. Point being, the production folk have done about all that can be done to make the printed material easy to read and understand. It is as if this book was well conceived, well designed, well written, and well printed, but the publisher skipped the final steps of preprinting production: the editing and index are not up to the quality of the rest of the book. The index should be five times its skimpy two pages of large print. I go on about the index because we are reading this book not for pleasure but to learn something: to understand how to use the D80's features. Especially, I want to be able to quickly locate how to change camera settings. Fortunately, the Table of Contents is nine pages of compact, structured, easy-to-scan print and stands in for the unusable index.

I seldom find book glossaries useful. This book is an exception. The sixty-plus terms are well selected and the several-to-many-sentence descriptions contain just the right amount and level of information.

So why five stars after all the griping and groaning? You can get past the inadequate final editing and the printing keeps the content from turning to mush; in fact, the printing lifts Stafford's excellent writing up and makes its content quick and easy to understand and retain. The book is 334 pages not counting the index (and you should not count the index). I can't believe the low price. Content, printing, and price offset the editing. For its few flaws, it really is an excellent book.

Buy Nikon D80 Magic Lantern Guides Now!

Thorough and Concise : Eric Shawver
This book goes way beyond the owner's manual by giving you in-depth background for the technologies built into this camera as well as first-hand advice for using its comprehensive features. The author give quite a bit of information that helps explain how the camera works, coupled with his own experiences and opinions with various available options.

Some have complained about the fact that the book contains black and white photos, as if they expected to see what kind of images the D80 can produce. When you think about it, all photographic images in a book printed on a conventional printing press are altered from what you'd get shooting with the D80--they've been converted to a different color space (CMYK or grayscale) and converted to dot patterns or screens needed to recreate an image that a printing press can produce, not what you'd see on your computer screen or the display screen of the camera.

Just What I Needed : Bobby J
I am an advanced amateur just trasitioning from film to digital. I bought the D-80 because I wanted a camera I could grow into rather than out of, and all opinions/reviews seem to agree this is such a a camera. However Nikon's operating manual did not enable me to feel I was ever going to be able to understand and learn to harness the camera's potential. I wanted something that would help me get organized and feel I was on a path that would enable me to understand and become confident with the camera. This book turned it all around. It provides an organized, logical, tutorial that clearly explains what the D-80 does; how to make it work for me; and supplements this with just the right amount additional information which promotes the feeling of not only how but why as well. I now feel I am going to be able to learn to use the camera and has enabled me to relax and look forward with confidence to using this remarkable tool. The little wallet-sized cheat sheet enclosed with this book is like training wheels that will prevent me from crashing and feeling I am never going to successfully master and fully enjoy this fine machine. The book's clarity and organization have enabled me to overcome my anxiety. It is "Just what I neededd". I think most new owners of the D-80 will agree it is just what is needed.