2 posts tagged “dslr”

Lots of people will offer you - fairly poor - reasons to buy a digital SLR in preference to what Flickr have rather annoyingly called "point and shoot" cameras. (I'd label them "compacts", personally.) Instead, I'm going to offer you five reasons not to buy one- or at least, to consider not buying a cheap one.

They're expensive, or compromised

The Nikon D40 - and the recently announced minor revamp, the D40x - have major compromises, in order to keep the price low. There are far fewer autofocus points than on professional DSLRs that cost more, but also fewer than on compacts that cost less. The EOS 400D has no LCD display on the top of the body. One could argue that's something you don't realise you need until you've seen a better model, but it does make things more finicky. There are also very few SLRs with live displays on the back, and for people who've got used to using digital cameras at arm's length rather than through a viewfinder, that's pretty jarring.

To avoid these problems, you need to be looking at the level of SLRs above the entry level- the D80s and D30s, in other words. These will cost you nearer £800 than £500; for that you could get any compact you wanted, or even both an ultracompact and a more able model.

Compacts perform nearly as well

There are surprisingly few photographs that an SLR is capable of taking that a compact isn't, and, perhaps surprisingly, the converse is true; there are things compacts can do that SLRs can't (especially not the body+kit lens combination that many people end up with).

In the first category, there are some low light shots, long exposures, and the use of narrow depth of field. However, the first of these is increasingly the focus of improvements in compacts; ISO 800 and 1600 are becoming common on them, as is image stablisation. Neither Nikon nor Canon offer in-body IS yet; both make it a feature of the lens instead, and you'll need to spend around £300 on a lens that supports it.

Narrow depth of field remains a differentiator for SLRs, but it's also easy to overdo it when you first get a lens that's capable of it (I certainly did), and as I've noted before, kit lenses aren't significantly better at it than compacts. Wide angle is also becoming common on compact cameras now.

A field where compacts typically outperform SLRs is zoom range. Even ignoring the "superzoom" class - cameras like Canon's PowerShot S3IS and Panasonic's DMC-FZ7 - the average compact has a 4x zoom, whereas the Canon 350D comes with a kit lens that only does 3x zoom (a range of 18-55mm). Obviously, the point of SLRs is that you can swap out lenses, but then you're, once again, looking at a few hundred pounds to replicate a camera that you could have bought for not much more.

The one point where SLRs can claim a true advantage is sensor size: they're much closer to 35mm film than the 1/1.8" sensors commonly found in compacts. On the other hand, people are evidently happy with cameras in phones, even though they're even tinier; if you post to the web, do you care that pixel-peeping will reveal a bit of fuzziness?

Size

SLRs are pretty big and heavy, and that's just with the kit lens. When you start packing a second (or third) lens and a couple of filters, you're suddenly moving around a lot of stuff. Most owners of SLRs pack them for special occasions, but don't carry them around every day. (I'm a bit odd in that I do carry mine, but I got used to carrying a laptop around, and that's even heavier.) Compared to that, a compact that can fit into a pocket - or at least a shoulder bag - is a lot more likely to be on you when you need it.

Extensibility - blessing or curse?

Obviously, one of the biggest selling points of SLRs is that you can replace the lens, and therefore get the ideal camera for every occasion. This is true, but it carries with it drawbacks. As noted above, there's both the expense of multiple lenses, and the annoyance of carrying them around.

Even the camera manufacturers have (finally) acknowleged another drawback of changable lenses: sensor dust. Every time you swap your kit lens and the 50mm prime, you let in dust to the body, and some of this will settle on the sensor. There are cameras with shake mechanisms to remove the dust, and also with software that detects and repairs it on taken photos, but it's still a problem that needs to be worked around. Unlike on compacts.

One final point - shared by a few, but not many, compacts - is that the file sizes of photos taken with SLRs, especially raw files, might be bigger than you're used to. It's not uncommon to produce a gigabyte of photos on a good day out, and when laptop hard drives are still mired around the 150GB mark, that's a big chunk of your space gone, just in one day.

Video

SLRs don't do video, which is increasingly becoming a flaw that people don't want to tolerate. There are good technical reasons for this, but it's still going to be a bit of a shock for people who've come to expect that option on their digital cameras. It's something I've missed, too; there are some things where motion is a part of what you're trying to capture, and while it's possible to do that if you're a great photographer, it's harder than shooting a quick movie.

In Conclusion

Before spending your £500 on an SLR - and remember my previous advice that you should probably be budgeting that amount again to get the most out of it - have a look around at some of the digital compacts. You could save money and be happier, with only a little less.

Despite the fact I don't really know what the hell I'm talking about, I seem to get asked for advice about buying digital SLR cameras sometimes.

My main three pieces of advice are as follows:

• Think about whether you need a DSLR
• Budget 50% more than the cost of the camera alone
• Choose on lens range, not just a camera body

Do you need a DSLR?

Most people seem to be graduating from Ixus-class digital ultracompacts, which have no manual controls (or very little in the way of controls). However, between the tiny cameras and DSLRs there's a whole range of decent, configurable cameras, such as the PowerShot S80 and Fuji F30, which give you as much rope to hang yourself as an SLR does. They also have none of the disadvantages of the larger cameras (which I may refer to in the future).

Many compacts have image stabilisation; while that's beginning to show up in SLR bodies, it's an expensive add-on for lenses, and you'll spend far more than you would otherwise. The aforementioned Fuji F30 goes to ISO 3200, which previously was the sort of low-light domain that only the big cameras lived in. If you want a camera to zoom in a long way, the likes of the Lumix DMC-FZ30 and PowerShot S3 IS have a reach that will outcompete your kit lens, while costing about as much a single decent lens for your putative SLR. Which brings us to:

Budget for lenses

If you thought you were going to spend £600 and be done, I've a rude shock for you. The kit lens that you've just got  along with the camera? It's not very good. You can't get that nifty narrow depth of field that all the cool kids on Flickr seem to manage. It's a bit rubbish at taking photos at night. When you examine your photos on the computer you noticed that everything's a bit blurry. It doesn't zoom very far and you've realised you can't take a photo of the top of that skyscraper you like so much.

Of course, you know that you can go out and buy different lenses. So you have a look and find that the 50mm is under £100, which is great, but then there's another 50mm with a wider aperture and that's over £300, but all the reviews say it's even better. Or maybe you want a 30mm instead, because it's more like an film camera? Another £300. Decent telephoto lens with IS? £300 again. Remote control? Lens hood? OK, those are cheap, but they build up. And let's hope you're used to the size of files your new camera will generate, especially in RAW mode. So there's a couple of 2GB memory cards. Hence my bullet point: within a few months of buying your SLR, you may well want to spend about half the price of it again on lenses and other goodies. Be aware of that before you even spend the first penny.

Of course, you can choose to do without all of this, but then, why did you buy a camera with interchangeable lenses? Speaking of which:

Choose a system, not just a body

All the reviews, and most of the discussions you see, concentrate on what people call "bodies"; the camera, like the Canon 400D or the Nikon D80. Not many people suggest you look at the entire range of lenses, but it makes sense, because if you don't like going to third parties, they differentiate the makes as much - if not more so - than the bodies.

For example, Canon have a very wide angle lens (the EF-S 10-22mm) for their digital cameras*; Nikon's equivalent is 12-22mm, so it's not quite as wide, which may bother you. On the other hand, Nikon have better general-purpose zoom lenses (they offer 18-55, 18-70, 18-135 and 18-200; Canon only have 18-55, albeit in two wildly varying aperture ranges, and 17-85). Another major point is that Nikon and Pentax cameras can use decades-old manual focus lenses (which are cheap second hand); Canon and the Four-Thirds cameras can't.

I realise, having come through this process, that it's hard to work out before you have an SLR what all those numbers mean (notice that I don't even mention maximum apertures, which are really pretty important), but nonetheless it's worth thinking about all this before you choose your camera.

* Yes, I should really say "crop-sensor digital SLRs" here, but I didn't want to confuse people too much. I should also note that not all digital camera lenses will work with full-sensor cameras, but that's not really relevant to the point I'm making.

In conclusion

Apparently a large percentage of people who buy a digital SLR never buy another lens for their camera. I wonder if they know what they're missing (and I'd say they're missing a lot).

So, don't waste your money on something you don't need. If you're sure, then choose carefully, looking at both cameras and lenses, and be prepared to spend more to the most out of it.