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Considering a Digital SLR
By Jacob Cohen | April 5, 2007
For a while, I’ve been content to use a snapshot camera that more or less fits in my pocket. My wife and I have a 3.2 megapixel Canon that works well for most things. I had always thought that getting a digital SLR with a good lens was only needed for professional photography.
However, my parents recently visited, and after seeing some of the pictures my father took with his Canon Digital Rebel, I’m starting to think that they might even be worth it for everyday pictures.
Here’s a picture he took of our dog Sierra, in our family room. The lighting looks surprisingly natural, compared to the pictures we’ve taken with our snapshot camera in the same room, which tend to come out heavy in the yellow and red color range. This has been reduced from its original resolution to 400×305 to fit on this page.
If you follow the link, you can see the same picture in a larger size (each dimension halved from the original). This starts to give an idea of the quality of the photo. At this magnification, our snapshot camera would already be starting to compromise the picture quality. There’s no motion blur, even though this picture was taken without a tripod. For comparison, look at the picture I took for my review of the Sony Ericsson Z710i. That was the best of some 20+ pictures I took, after tweaking every setting I could find and even bracing the camera to prevent it from moving when I took the picture. The DSLRs have much higher speeds and don’t suffer from this problem.
The other point I used as a consideration for the digital SLRs was the price. Until recently, I had it fixed in my mind that the digital SLR cameras started at about $1000, and went up from there. However, it appears the price has come down considerably.
These are two cameras I found on Amazon.com with minimal effort:
- Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP ($600)
- Olympus Evolt E500 8MP ($629)
This is still a sizeable chunk of money to spend on a camera for a novice photographer, but I have to say I am impressed with the quality you get. The picture quality is many times better for about twice the price of a typical snapshot camera.
Topics: General |
