Nikon has just announced their new D60 digital SLR camera. I’m not sure that introducing more naming conflicts to the DSLR world is necessarily a great idea (I’m talking about the aging — but not completely useless — Canon D60 here, which still pulls in about $200 on eBay.) But there you have it, a new D60, this time from Nikon.

It sounds remarkably similar to the Nikon D40X. And when I say “remarkably,” I mean “holy crap that’s the same camera resurrected from the camera graveyard for a cheesy sequel!” It has the same body, same sensor and resolution, same specifications, and so on. So, what are the differences? Let’s list them.

  1. An anti-dust system that has both sensor shake and a special airflow design that’s designed to keep dust away from the sensor in the first place.
  2. Active D-Lighting (which is becoming popular, but I’m still not convinced that it gives you anything that you wouldn’t get with Photoshopping your RAW files…)
  3. Stop motion recording mode. Not exactly groundbreaking, and not anything that you wouldn’t rather do on the computer where you’d get more control over the video creation options.
  4. The kit lens is now an anti-shake 18-55mm VR Nikon lens.

So, there you have it. It sounds like a pretty minor upgrade, if you ask me. Of course, if I’ve missed some huge nugget of awesomeness in the specs somewhere, please let me know in the comments. Maybe the D60 actually spits gold nuggets out of the memory card slot on demand. That could be pretty cool…