I’m starting to take photography as a real hobby, spending many weekends out there shooting, and I feel it’s time to change my shooting gear from a canon A520 point & shoot (which surprisingly accepts a lot of manual settings) and my old canon AE-1 (with a tamron 70-280 lens, and the trusty old 50mm prime) to a dSLR. Now I have done quite a lot of research about Nikon and Canon dSLR cameras (Nikon D50 and Canon 350D in particular), and I know both are very good bodies with not-the-greatest kit lenses. And I know that it all comes to lenses when photo quality is considered, and that both manufacturers have excelent lenses. I also know that I’ll stick with the brand I choose now for the next couple of years.
Question: How do Nikon and Canon lens offerings compare together in terms of pricing and quality? To be more specific, if you take two very similar lenses (both in terms of numbers AND optics quality) from each manufacturer, which one would be cheaper? Would this be a general rule?
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You can’t go wrong with either system. Nikon and Canon both have some great lenses. I’m a Nikon guy myself, and the 17-35mm 2.8, the 85mm 1.4, and the 70-200mm 2.8 are spectacular. Canon has its own gems. But these are all lenses that cost over $1000.
For me the choice was easy. I wanted a fantastic zoom with a 24-80mm range. Nikon had a 17-55 2.8 lens (with the crop factor it was just what I needed) and at that time Canon had nothing to compete with it.
If you want to compare by price, you’ll have to puzzle together the ideal package FOR YOU with both systems and look up the prices.
For a while I also worried about my lens investment with regard to the crop factor. With Canon, you KNOW your upgrade will be full frame. With Nikon, it MIGHT be – a lot can change in 5 years. In the end, I decided to just get the lenses that I need to take great shots now. If in 5 years time I need a different wide zoom and normal zoom, so be it.
If anyone can, canon can.
Nikon are higher quality but more expensive, Canon are cheaper and easier to find (more shops carry them).
Well lenses are not only made by Nikon and canon there are manufacturers who make professional lenses which are quite expensive. If you are serious about photography get the best equipment you can afford, quality is more important than quantity. I like the cannon bodies because they are lighter. And i got used to using cannons about 25 years ago, switching is a very hard thing to get used to. Good luck with the hobby Don’t forget the composition and subject is also vary important
In addition to the good points the other answers offered, there’s another factor to consider: Canon has changed its lens mount several times in recent years, meaning everyone using Canon had to get all new lenses. While there have been rumblings about Nikon changing, they haven’t done so in…35 years or so?
With about 90% of all lenses ever made having been made to fit Nikon (!), that means there’s a huge selection of used Nikon glass out there.
In my office full of pro photographers, we’re about 50/50 Nikon/Canon. The Nikon guys use the D100, but the D70s is Very nice–don’t bother with the D50. The Canon guys use the Eos 30D. The Nikon comes with much better in-computer software and is a better body, if that helps any.
Me, I use a Fuji Finepix S3 Pro, which is built on the Nikon chassis. It’s slow, but the RAW image quality–and we shoot every single frame in RAW, we’ve learned there’s no point AT ALL in doing anything else–is far better in the Fuji than either Nikon or Canon.