Rear of Camera Controls

The rear of the D40 is dominated by the large multi-function LCD monitor. Down the left side of the monitor are the four buttons; play, menu, thumbnails and magnify. To the right the four way controller and OK button and erase. My only gripe with the 'hard controls' is that there's no dedicated shortcut to change ISO sensitivity or White Balance, you can program the FUNC button (on the side of the camera) but it seems to me that Nikon could have used the four-way controller for these functions while in shooting mode. Without a customized Fn button you have to press the setting (i) button then navigate the information display and change a setting (see the next page for details on how exactly this works), it's considerably slower than having a dedicated hard button. I presume Nikon think owners of the D40 won't be changing these settings very often, personally I would expect even beginners to want to experiment with such settings easily.

Single press buttons (Shooting mode)

Button	Description
	Playback mode Enters or exits from Playback mode, pressing this button displays the last image taken (or the last image on the card) in the last used display mode.
MENU	Camera menu Display or cancel the camera menu (detailed later in this review).
	Help Press and hold this button in Auto or one of the Vari-Program modes to display a page of help, this also works in the cameras menu system. In certain circumstances (such as low light) this button will provide special context sensitive help such as 'Lighting is poor; flash recommended'.
	Setting Press this button to enter 'setting' mode which activates the information display an enables you to change any displayed setting, such as image quality, white balance, ISO sensitivity etc. (detailed on the next page). (I'm not quite sure why the OK button couldn't perform the same function).
	4-way controller In shooting mode where AF point selection is enabled the 4-way controller is used to choose AF points. In playback mode this control reverts to image navigation / menu movement.

Single press buttons (Playback mode)

Button	Description
	Protect Protects or un-protects the current image. This places a read-only flag on the image file and stops it from being accidentally deleted or deleted using a 'delete all images' option. It does not protect the image from a card format.
MENU	Camera menu Display or cancel the camera menu (detailed later in this review).
	Zoom out / Thumbnail view If a single image is displayed on the screen pressing this button switches to 2x2 and then 3x3 thumbnail views. In zoom view mode pressing this button steps out of magnification.
	Zoom in If a single image is displayed on the screen pressing this button enters zoom view mode and steps into the first level of magnification, there are 7 levels up to 19x (although it's clear looking at the screen that there's no more detail beyond about 8x). In thumbnail view mode pressing this button steps back towards a single image view.
	Delete When an image is displayed pressing delete will display a "Delete?" prompt, press this button once more to delete the image, a simple but elegant solution to the delete confirmation.
	4-way controller Press left or right to browse through images, up or down to change display mode: Image with simple info, Image & information page 1, Image & information page 2, Image & highlights, Image & histogram.
OK	Retouching menu Pressing the OK button in Playback mode displays a pop-up version of the retouching menu.

Front controls

On the front right side of the camera are two buttons, the flash release / flash mode button and the self-timer / Fn button which can be reprogrammed.

Buttons (combined with the command dial)

	Flash mode / flash compensation Press this button and turn the command dial to change flash mode, do the same with the exposure compensation button held to adjust flash power output (flash compensation. In P, A, S or M modes:  • Flash on  • Red-eye reduction  • Red-eye reduction with slow sync  • Slow sync  • Rear-curtain sync In Auto / Vari-Program mode:  • Auto flash  • Auto with red-eye reduction  • Flash off
Fn	Self-timer / Fn In its default mode this button enables or disables the self-timer, via custom setting 11 however you can re-program this button to allow you to set; self-timer, shooting mode (drive), image quality / size, ISO sensitivity or white balance.