Nikon D5100 18-55mm VR Kit review

Sadly, Nikon hasn’t taken this opportunity to reconsider the function of these buttons. There is still a pair dedicated to zooming in and out during playback or magnifying the live view image. Another two, marked Info and i, bring up various information and settings on the screen. However, there are no buttons for ISO speed, white balance or drive mode. Instead, these functions must be browsed to using the i button and navigation pad. Even these controls aren’t comprehensive; defining a manual white balance temperature or toggling the Auto ISO function is only possible via the main Menu, which is even slower to navigate.

It’s particularly disappointing that the D5100 doesn’t inherit the cheaper D3100’s lever for selecting drive modes. To make matters worse, the self-timer and automatic HDR modes reset to single frame advance after each shot, and reactivating them using the convoluted controls was extremely tedious. The one positive aspect to the lack of labelled buttons is that the navigation pad provides direct control of the active autofocus point when it’s not doing anything else. However, reach for this control too quickly after shooting and the camera starts browsing through shots stored on the SD card instead.

It’s not all bad news, of course. There are some new features that we really like, including the aforementioned HDR mode – something that’s common on Sony and Pentax’s SLRs but not seen before from Nikon. It’s fairly simple, taking two shots at up to 3 EV exposure difference, aligning them to counter small differences in how they’re framed and blending them for a single, high-dynamic-range photo. The ability to recover lost highlights and shadows wasn’t as dramatic as we expected but the results looked more natural than we’ve seen from other cameras.

There’s a range of special effects with names such as Color Sketch and Night Vision, although anyone with image-editing software won’t see much point in applying them in-camera. The High Key and Low Key effects are more useful, though, adjusting settings to correctly exposure the brightest or darkest parts of the scene.