Review: Nikon D3400 specs

Looking for a starter DSLR? The DX-format Nikon D3400 is a great choice, with a 24.2-megapixel sensor for producing detailed images. This camera body is light and easy to handle, shoots in low light at up to ISO 25,600, captures the action at up to five frames-per-second and has an 11-point autofocus system.

As an upgrade on the Nikon D3300, the D3400 features an even lighter body at just 395g, almost double the battery life, and a number of internal upgrades including Bluetooth LE connectivity.

For learners, there is a special Guide Mode, accessed on the camera’s mode dial. This provides you with four menu choices—Shoot, View/delete, Retouch or Set up. Each of these has a sub-menus. For example, in ‘Shoot’ you can choose ‘Easy operation’ or ‘Advanced operation’. The ‘Easy operation’ option will bring up a choice of shooting portraits, night portraits, night landscapes, distant subjects, close-ups and moving subjects, shooting without flash or in automatic mode. Selecting one of them will then set the D3400 to the relevant Scene mode. Guide Mode allows you to choose an option and then explains it to you—so, the camera is teaching you as you shoot.

Nikon DSLR are optimised for use with Nikon DSLR lenses, which are smaller and lighter in weight when compared to Nikon’s FX lenses for the company’s full-frame FX DSLRs. When shooting with the Nikon DX format, you get a 1.5x crop factor—this means a 100mm lens on the Nikon D3400 will give you an effective focal length of 150mm to get you ‘closer’ to subjects. This is a bonus when you consider a 100mm on a full-frame FX camera will give you a focal length of ‘just’ 100mm.

The D3400 features the same 11-point autofocus system as its D3300 predecessor, which has a single cross-type point at its centre. This cross-type autofocus point analyses both vertical and horizontal lines and is more accurate than autofocus points that only analyse vertical lines. The camera is capable of locking on to subjects even when they are off-centre, moving quickly or erratically. This is helped by a 3D-tracking system that operates with all 11 autofocus points.

On the rear of the camera, there’s a large, fixed three-inch [7.5cm] 921K-dot TFT LCD monitor, which has a 170-degree viewing angle, approximately 100% frame coverage and brightness adjustment. The screen lets you view full-frame or thumbnails—4, 9 or 72—of your images with playback zoom. It also offers movie or panoramic playback, photo slideshows, a histogram display, auto image rotation, picture ratings and the chance to add up to 36 characters of comments on your pictures.

The D3400’s standard ISO range of 100-12,800 but this can be expanded up to ISO 25,600—this means you can shoot in very low light conditions, such as at a live music event, and get images with minimal noise. You can choose to shoot in Fine, Normal or Basic JPEG quality or, if you want more original information in your images, you can shoot NEF (12-bit RAW). The key advantage of shooting RAW is that it retains all of the image information so you have more details to work with when you come to edit your pictures later on.

An Effects Mode in the camera offers you the option to select from 13 choices, which include ‘Pop’ to add colour to your images, ‘Easy Panorama’ for shooting wide vistas or ‘HDR Painting’ to add an artistic look to your pictures. Perhaps the key operational advantage of the D3400 over the D3300 is the addition of Bluetooth connectivity. This means that, via Nikon’s Snapbridge, the D3400 can be connected to your smart device via Bluetooth for immediate syncing of your pictures as you’re shooting.

While it’s clearly an entry-level DSLR, the D3400 does score many points for the quality of its images, its low weight (just 395g, including with battery and memory card), its Guide Mode, the large LCD screen for reviewing images and movies, plus a range of creative modes to help you to shoot pictures packed with imagination. It’s well worth considering as a first-ever DSLR camera.