I’d like to know which Canon camera would be the best to start off with. I’m thinking $500-$600 budget wise (or something around that is fine too). I guess your top 3 preferences would do.

Also, if the camera does not have Live View, would that make taking pictures harder? Is Live View a necessity?
Thanks.

whats the best lens to get for a canon xs dslr camera if i want to take great pictures that are not expensive? id like to take pictures of landscape, action, low light, and macro…if it takes two lenses that would be fine…just need to know which two are the best for the money…looking to spend about $300…thanks

I don’t know anything about professional photography, and I need a reasonable priced digital SLR to practice with. What do you suggest?

I’m planning to spend between £450-£600 on a digital SLR camera sometime soon and I was wondering what the best one out there is at the moment.
Preferably I’d like opinions from people who have actually had experience with cameras in general…
I’d be interested to hear about noise handling in particular.

I have used point and shoot cameras for 2 years and would love to graduate to digital SLR cameras.
I would prefer a camera which is not too new in the market.

Two main types of sensors are used in digital SLRs today: CCD (charge coupled device) and CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) imagers. Although each type of sensor uses different technology to capture images, there’s no inherent quality difference between them. Some vendors, including Sony, Pentax/Samsung, and Nikon, make great dSLRs based on CCDtechnology. Fujifilm’s latest dSLR uses what it describes as a SuperCCD sensor. But Nikon also offers dSLRs built around CMOS sensors (fabricated by Sony), so it’s logical to expect Sony to blossom into the CMOS arena, too. Firmly in the CMOS camp are Canon and Sigma. Note that although the Foveon sensor used in Sigma cameras is.

Both CCD and CMOS imagers use metal-oxide semiconductors (although,apparently, the CMOS type is more complementary), and they have about the same degree of sensitivity to light. The main difference is in what each type sensor does with the light after capturing it:

• The CCD sensor
  is “dumb” to the extent that all it does is capture photons as electrical charges in each photosite/pixel. After exposure, the charges are swept off the chip to an amplifier located in one corner of the sensor. External circuitry converts the analog signal to digital form and handles storing it on your memory card.
• A CMOS sensor,
  theoretically, is a lot more complicated than its CCD counterpart. It includes solid-state circuitry at each and every photosite and can manipulate the data for each pixel right in the sensor. That’s pretty cool because it gives the CMOS sensor the ability to respond to lighting conditions in ways that a CCD can’t. However, sweeping all the photon information off a CMOS chip isn’t necessary; every photosite can be accessed individually.

Some interesting components are piled on top of both sensor types. These components include

• Color filters, which give the color-blind CCD and CMOS chips the ability to respond to various colors of light.
• Teensy microlenses that focus the incoming light onto the photosensitive area in each photo site.
• A protective transparent layer that contains a special filter (an antialiasing filter) that smooths out the incoming light signal by eliminating certain frequencies of light before they can clash. This layer also includes an infrared cutoff filter that removes most of the IR light component from the illumination reaching the sensor (because so-called “IRcontamination” can affect image quality and produce off-color colors).

Most professional DSLRs set you back 5 to 8 grand. If you’re selling your work, the camera is well worth the cost. Cameras in this class include the Nikon D2xs, Canon
EOS-1D Mark III, Canon EOS 5D, and Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II. These models take you all the way from 12MP up to a lofty 16MP (or beyond) and can,arguably, meet or exceed the image quality of the best film cameras.

Here’s a quick checklist of what your extra cash buys:

Tank-like reliability:
I really have no experience with how reliable tanks are, but they must be pretty good if being “built like a tank” is a positive. Pro DSLRs have metal bodies, excellent sealing against the elements, and rugged controls and components like shutters that can be operated thousands of times without failing. A typical professional might shoot more pictures in a day than an amateur photographer takes in a year. Professionals can’t afford to have a camera wimp out at the worst possible moment. So, many of these cameras are purchased for their ruggedness alone, and even then true pros commonly buy multiple bodies in order to have a backup or two or three.

Faster operation:
Pro cameras generally have the most advanced auto-focus systems available from a vendor, so they can take pictures right now without delay or shutter lag. They have large internal memory buffers to suck up exposures as fast as you can take them, and the speedy digital image chips process the bits and bytes and then write them to your memory card. Exposure systems, too, are top-notch, both in accuracy and speed. Professional dSLRs are veritable speed demons.

Faster burst modes:
Whereas prosumer dSLRs are considered speedy if they can capture continuous-mode pictures at 3 fps, pro cameras typically can grab 4 to 10 fps without sweating. Those big memory buffers (to store images until they can be written to the memory card) and digital signal processing chips make this speed possible.

More options:
Pro cameras let you set up multiple sets of shooting parameters and recall them at the press of a button, so you can tailor your camera’s operation to particular environments. You might find other choices not available to lesser cameras, such as the ability to save images in compressed or uncompressed RAW format, TIFF, and multiple levels of JPEG quality.

Bigger sensors:
Some pro cameras offer larger sensors, which can be an advantage to pro shooters. These size able sensors are available from Canon; several models are offered by Kodak (before they were discontinued); and there are a few so-called medium-format DSLRs. In the case of the Canon and late, lamented Kodak models, the cameras used traditional 35mm-camera-style lenses but imaged on a sensor that was the same size as a full 35mm frame. A chief advantage of this was the ability to use any existing 35mm camera lens with no lens crop factor applied.

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