I’ve now got my first Digital SLR camera. It’s a Nikon D50 6.1Megapixel camera with 18-55mm lens.

Now I’m no expert as far as cameras are concerned, but comparing it against the digital (non-SLR) cameras I’ve had it just blows them out of the water.

This camera is one of the cheapest digital SLR’s and in fact at the moment is the cheapest available at less than £500. It’s nearest rival is the Canon EOS 350D, which is a little bit more expensive.

From my point of view there is very little between these two cameras. The Canon EOS 350D has a higher resolution at 8.0 Megapixels, but then 6.1 Megapixels should be enough for most people wanting to print up to A4 size. The Canon takes compact flash (including Microdrives), which does give it the potential to have much more memory on a card (if you can afford them), whereas the Nikon D50 uses SD (Secure Digital memory cards), which are a little cheaper, smaller and can be used in a wider range of devices including non SLR cameras and PDAs such as Palm and some Windows Pocket PC PDA devices.
For me it turned out to be that the Nikon took SD flash cards (so can swap and change with my other devices), and that it was slightly cheaper, but really there was very little between them when I made my choice.
One of the nice things about the camera using SD cards is that my palm PDA includes a picture viewer. So after taking some shots I can review them on the screen of my Palm Tungsten T3, which is much bigger than the LCD on the back of the camera. See my Blog entry reviewing the Palm PDA devices.

The first thing that I noticed about the camera (other than how much bigger it is compared to compact digital cameras), is how responsive it is. Photos are taken the moment that the shutter is pressed, which is so much better than I’ve had out of my pentax compact digital camera. What’s more as soon as the camera has taken a photo it is able to take more straight after each other. Finally I have been able to get a photograph of my baby smiling (all attempts before have failed due to the lag between pressing the button and the photo being taken). The photographs that I’ve taken using either the auto or child mode have looked great.

Of course buying a D-SLR and then only ever using it in auto-mode would be such a waste. I therefore plan to go on a days course in January to get some professional advice on taking photos.

The thing I need now is to get some more SD Flash memory. I have already filled a 512MB card in less than a day. I’ve just ordered a 1GB Hi-Speed SD Card from Amazon. As the card is hi-speed should mean that I can take more photos before having to wait for the data to be written to the card, I’ll see if that is true when it arrives. The card I’ve ordered is a Bytestor Hi-Speed 66X SD Card 1GB which has some good reviews and is very inexpensive.

• Later Blog Entry on Making a Start in Photography at Jessops School of Photography

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 and is filed under General, Photography, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.