For those interested in digital photography, there are many choices of cameras including point and shoot, digital SLRs, and a wide variety of film and slide cameras.  This article assumes that you're in the market for a Digital SLR (or DSLR) camera and want to gather opinions on Nikon's lower to medium end.

A few years ago, Nikon offered the D50 and the D80.  Both were really well made, where the difference was mainly in Megapixels, a few features, and price.  Since then, the D40, D40x, and D60 have replaced the D50.  These cameras are a downgrade, in my opinion, because they don't have a built in auto-focus drive. Without that, it seriously limits your lens options and the lenses that are compatible tend to be more expensive because they need autofocus built in.  These newer cameras produce larger images, and have a few other features, but the absense of the autofocus drive is a big minus.

On the other hand, the D80 has been replaced with the D90.  This includes all the new features in the D40 and D60 and includes the autofocus drive.  The D90 camera body is around $900, the D60 camera body is around $500, and the D40 is all but obsolete and runs about the same as the D60 if you can find it.

The best way to look at whether or not to purchase a D60 or a D90 is the number of lenses that you want to eventually have.  If you take a two lenses and all else being the same except that one has an autofocus drive and the other doesn't, the one that doesn't will probably be a couple hundred dollars cheaper.  Two of these, and you paid for the difference to upgrade to the D90 - especially if you can get a comparible Sigma or other third party brand's lens.  You could literally spend 1/2 the price as the Nikkor version with pretty close to the same end result (of course that varies depending on the specific lenses in question).

The D90 is a 12.3 Megapixel digital SLR camera with a FX format sensor (1.5x), live view, a self-cleaning sensor, a movie mode, GPS tagging, ISO 3200, 4.5 frames per second, and in-camera editing.

The D60 is a 10.2 Megapixel digital SLR camera with a FX fomat sensor, 1600 ISO and shoots up to 3 frames per second.

The FX format sensor is the standard digital 1.5x zoom sensor which means that at any focal length, you have to multiply it by 1.5 to determine the true focal length.  FX cameras are handy for telephoto lenses, but aren't as good on the wide angle end.

As you can see, the D90 is $400 more, but you get more megapixels, better ISO, more captures for those action shots, and a few other perks like movie mode and GPS tagging.  Still, the real difference is the D90 has autofocus built in which will allow you to use any lens with a Nikon mount.