This is the one thing that’s totally been annoy­ing me ever since I got this cam­era. I love it in pretty much every other respect, and, despite enjoy­ing the D80’s top LCD dis­play and extra phys­i­cal con­trols (got to use this body for a cou­ple of weeks with work), am still com­pletely con­vinced it’s the best-value DSLR avail­able today. With the D90 get­ting offi­cial tomor­row, the D80 will prob­a­bly fall towards the cur­rent D60 price point, but still… D60s are the best!

I would’ve been happy with a D40x but there was really no price dif­fer­ence between the two, so whatever.

Any­way: pet peeve that I just solved. File num­ber­ing is, by default, non-sequential for every time you empty the SD card! There was no obvi­ous set­ting to this effect, but that is because, it turns out, set­tings are hid­den by default.

Using the menu, nav­i­gate under Setup Menu to “CSM/Setup menu” and select “Full”.

This will reveal more options. Scroll down to the next page of options and select “File no. sequence” and “On”. Impor­tantly in this area is the “Reset” func­tion for if you actu­ally do want to reset between shoots.

Nor­mally I’d be pretty happy with the default behav­ior, but hav­ing recently been doing large-ish travel stints that involve shoot­ing pho­tos that I was sync­ing as I went more for secu­rity (if the camera/card got dam­aged) than out of actual neces­sity. As reg­u­lar shoots would be over more quickly it’s less of an issue for day-to-day use, but I’m lots hap­pier now I know the option’s there!