How do I Make a Decision which Digital Camera to Buy?
Friday, June 13th, 2008
In response to the blog post entitled: How do I Make a Decision which Digital Camera to Buy? on digital-photography-school.com I post the following.
This is a vast area to cover, and can’t be covered in a single comment. I spent about 2 weeks working 10hours+ per day over the Christmas holidays 18 months ago purely doing research into what route to take when upgrading to a DSLR from a compact, and found out a great deal. If doing it again, I’d have sat down with someone and gotten a good grasp for more of the basics of the theory of things and the techniques involved first. The vast research is mandatory if you are to be even vaguely successfully however, the following 3 items are the gotchas that are not immediately apparent:
1) This was more relevant in the film days, and has been diluted in the digital age, but the principal still applies. When the shutter is open and the photo is being taken, the only thing between the sensor and the outside world is the lens, the lens forms the image — therefor it’s the most important element of the whole setup. If buying a DSLR, make sure that you budget at least as much for lenses as you do for the camera — and also budget for getting more lenses in the months/years later as your skills grow. I currently have 9 lenses, 4 of which have been totally superseded.
2) Lens reviews are fantastic — there are many online, and the online stuff is orders of magnitude better than magazine stuff. However a lens is reviewed against it’s competitors. For similar lenses, a $200 kit lens that is reviewed “great” is much worse than a $600 lens that’s reviewed “ok”. I fell foul of this one, and bought a cheap tele zoom that turned out to be a complete disappointment.
3) This is the killer, brand loyalty — it’s rife in the SLR scene because it’s so proprietary accessory based (see above for my 9 lenses) — you have to pick a system and stick with it (or spent obsurd amounts of money changing systems). Ask virtually any photographer and they will tell you thier system is better than all the others, infact this is not true (however hard they try to persuade you) every system has it’s advantages and disadvantages, but most of the major systems are very close overall. Shop around and don’t be pressured into one camp by anyone.
One final tip — don’t overlook the second hand market for lenses — in can be a minefield for the uninformed, but a goldmine for the informed — become informed and reap the benefits of 20 year old glass that’s as good as new, at quarter the price.