"What to look for" Part 2

The other day, I started talking about what to look for when getting into the digital SLR game and had fairly quickly winnowed things down to 2 brands and 1 tier of mega-pixels. You guys must of thought; Wow another Ken Rockwell, cock-sure and dogmatic!

So let me slow down, back up and explain how and why I got to this place so quickly. And working backwards, it comes down to basic economics. I never said that the other brands like Sony, Pentax, Olympus and Samsung weren't any good. What I said was that they didn't hold anywhere near the market-share so they sold less, A LOT LESS of their product......and that means that there's a lot fewer of those models sitting around out there looking to be sold back into the market. Although the Olympus E Series cameras are excellent, and the Sony A Series or heck; the Konica/Minolta Maxxum 7D and 5D were excellent cameras, there is simply a lot less of them out there looking to be sold. Typically this means higher prices. I could draw you some nice charts explaining this, or take a long time to explain, but just trust me on this. When you combine this with the fact that ALL the independent lens manufacturers make their product in the Canon and the Nikon mounts, then the same is true of buying lenses for your new DSLR baby.

So, what's the story with 6 megapixels? Simply put, that's the lowest sensor resolution you can get away with and still get "equivilent to film" results on prints of up to anything reasonable....oh say 11 x 14 or even 13 x 19 inches.

OK, so lets assume that I've convinced you and you're going to focus on getting something in the 6Mp range made by either Canon or Nikon...now what? Well, you then determine what your budget is going to be and devote 2/3 of that to 1 lens; yes, I did say 1 lens. I'll use myself as an example. I had about $1000 to work with and wanted to pick up a DSLR with a good lens to the specs as I described above. In my case, I wanted a lens with what Nikon calls VR (Vibration Reduction) and Canon calls IS (Image Stabilization). I also wanted to rarely/if ever have to change lenses. So, for a 6Mp camera which would dictate an APS-C/DX sized sensor, that means a 35mm film equiv. of about 28mm on the wide end to somewhere around 200-300mm on the long end. Why those numbers?

On a 35mm camera, a 50mm lens is considered to have the angle of coverage which gives a perspective most closely resembling what we see from our eyes. In the typical progression, the most common focal lengths would be 35mm, 28mm, 24mm, 20mm, etc. on the wide end and 85mm, 135mm, 200mm, 300mm, 400mm etc. on the long end. Most photographers would consider 28mm as where "wide" starts and 135mm where "long or telephoto" starts. In order to get the kind of coverage that goes from wide to telephoto you'd need something like a 28-300mm zoom. In the digital world the majority of cameras sold are APS-C/DX sensor size, so using the 1.5x conversion, you'd need an 18-200mm lens.

Therefore in my case, I needed the Nikon 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 VR lens since canon didn't make one in that range which neatly costs around $650 used making it 2/3s of my $1000 budget. Which left me with $350 to buy the camera and the rest as you've hear...."is history".

Next time, I'll get into the finer details of camera/brand selection.