I bought myself a vertical/battery grip from eBay for my Nikon D60 today. After having sore fingers from long shoots which involved horizontal and vertical shots, I admit that the D60 body is indeed a little too small for my hands. Its shape is perfectly fine except for the fact that my pinky doesn’t have a place to rest itself and the finger next to the pinky (ring finger?) often finds itself rubbing against the edge of the camera, causing discomfort halfway through an event, and at the end of the event I’ll often see the poor finger going red and almost bruised-like.
Only costing ~AUD65, the third party (Nikon does/will not produce one for D40/x/60) vertical grip will be my hope to not just improve the comfort whilst handling the D60, but at the same time increase battery life with an additional slot for a spare battery, and in situation where both batteries have depleted, there is also an alternative of using 6AA batteries to power up the camera. Increasing weight for the body, this also means that it will be easier to carry heavier lenses as the weight from the additional vertical grip will in a way stabilise the weight of the lens, hence helping with stabilisation of the camera whilst shooting.
Of course, all good things have their flaws. These third party grips, although having a vertical shutter in the portrait orientation does not have the half-press shutter which allows AF before taking the shot. Notwithstanding that, in order to use the vertical shutter, one must change the settings in the camera to “remote release” and pull the infrared hatch from the grip which will send its signals to the camera’s infrared in order to take a shot. This means every time I want to switch from using the normal shutter to the vertical one, I would have to:
- Change the menu settings to remote release.
- Pop up the infrared hatch from the grip so it’ll send the signals to the camera.
- Press the shutter halfway only to see that it doesn’t support half-press shutter.
There are a couple of sellers claiming that their version of the grip supports half-press, but as far as my research went (in Google) and according to one of the sellers who claims such function, no 3rd party grips for D40/x/60 will support half-press shutter nor will the shutter be able to function without changing the shooting mode and popping up the hatch for the infrared. So don’t waste your money on the expensive ones which claims that the grip will do this or that. Just get a cheap one since all of them are made in China anyway. But as a rule of thumb, look for the one with similar texture of the camera, don’t get the ones that look completely smooth and plasticky because it will not complement the body.
Photos when I receive my grip in a couple of weeks (hopefully) 
And oh, did I mention that with the additional grip, my D60 will look more professional too? lol
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Thanks for the tips. I will buy next month a vertical grip for my nikon.