The Nikon d40
But the impressive thing about the D40 is that it is arguably the best-designed small camera to date. Handwise, it's perfect. The viewfinder is good, if not up to the D200 level. The controls are sensible and what we Nikon users expect. And the moving of the top LCD to the color LCD, while still with some slightly rough edges, turns out to be a lot more useful than you'd expect. As I note in the handling section, you can do 99% of the settings you're likely to make while shooting without dropping into the actual menus. Nikon almost hit a home run with that, and frankly, why their top end Coolpix cameras don't borrow the best aspects of this design I don't know. Color, noise, and resolution are quite good, and you have enough control over the first two items to get excellent image quality.