Some of the value of this book lies in Nikon's lousy D80 manual. Nikon's manual is ill organized and printed in gray on toilet paper. Okay, maybe it is recycled paper.
Stafford's Guide is full of well-organized information. It is well printed. I can even recognize the small icons in the text (not true of all camera books). I wish publishers would not shrink icons a second time to place them in tables. However, even these tiniest of icons are recognizable in this Guide.
The author, Simon Stafford, is an experienced photographer and author. His Scottish education and UK roots show through in his language but are not distracting. Unfortunately, poor editing diminishes Stafford's excellent writing and technical presentation. Lesser typographical errors are just distracting but some errors get in the way of understanding. "...offers the photographer total control overexposure, ..." stumps the eye until you realize it should have been "...over exposure".
That said, Magic Lantern/Lark Books printed the book on decent paper (except the covers curl) and with black ink. Vastly better than Nikon's manual. The photos, especially the super-close-up photos of the D80's anatomy, are very clear. The rich typography is excellent: headings are bold, bullets are well used to structure lists, captions are set off and readable, and on and on. Point being, the production folk have done about all that can be done to make the printed material easy to read and understand. It is as if this book was well conceived, well designed, well written, and well printed, but the publisher skipped the final steps of preprinting production: the editing and index are not up to the quality of the rest of the book. The index should be five times its skimpy two pages of large print. I go on about the index because we are reading this book not for pleasure but to learn something: to understand how to use the D80's features. Especially, I want to be able to quickly locate how to change camera settings. Fortunately, the Table of Contents is nine pages of compact, structured, easy-to-scan print and stands in for the unusable index.
I seldom find book glossaries useful. This book is an exception. The sixty-plus terms are well selected and the several-to-many-sentence descriptions contain just the right amount and level of information.
So why five stars after all the griping and groaning? You can get past the inadequate final editing and the printing keeps the content from turning to mush; in fact, the printing lifts Stafford's excellent writing up and makes its content quick and easy to understand and retain. The book is 334 pages not counting the index (and you should not count the index). I can't believe the low price. Content, printing, and price offset the editing. For its few flaws, it really is an excellent book.
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Top reviews from other countries
Marina Manova
El libro es en inglés y aunque yo lo quise ...
Reviewed in Spain on November 26, 2014Tom Lithgow
Nikon d80 Magic Lantern Book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2008