I posted this in the Non-scooby related, but was pushed this way :D, I wonder if anyone can help?

I'm after a new camera to take some proper shots. Currently I have a fuji compact which has 6 MP, which is ok, but I would like something with a bit of meat (camera that is). Looking around and I find that Fuji do a camera which has a 9 MP resolution, and is very reasonable price wise (at £400 ish) called the FUJI S9500

http://www.currys.co.uk/images/508210_01_huge.jpg

I know this isn't an SLR, and that's really what I was looking at, but I'm not a pro, and don't know what an SLR is (besides the fact that you can change lenses).

Can anyone reccomend a decent SLR which should be easy enough to use, or would this Fuji cater for my needs of taking pictures of my car, and also taking some pictures for my company (demo photos for display....we currently pay some geezer £500 a day to take posh shots, and I would rather spend the money on a camera and take them myself....how hard is it to take a photo of a pool )

Any help appreciated,

Matt

if you add £50 to your budget you can get a Canon 350D which is a DSLR, costs £550 but you currently get £100 cash back if bought with a mastercard.

see other threads a bit further down for full info, it is actually possible to get it for £370 but a few more hoops need to be jumped through and curry's dont have stock at the moment.

Mark

Warehouse Express www.warehouseexpress.com are doing the Nikon D50 for £474 as a kit.


Alot of us on here are not Pro's but still use SLR's, purely becuase of the picture quality and that they are more flexable systems.

Cheers guys.

I'm a bit confused by this megapixel malarky. The D50 is 6.1, yet my fuji at the moment is 6, and this one above is 9. Does that mean it will have better pictures, or is it more to do with lenses and other technical issues?

It means it will take larger pictures, i.e. more pixels, so in theory you can print them out bigger.

If you need to print really big pictures then more pixels is good, if your printing 6x4's then anything around 2 or 3 Mp is probably enough.

Quality comes from lots of things, two of the most important being the camera sensor and the lens, just having more pixels doesnt equal better pictures though.

Mark

^^^^^ What he said.

Remember that the size and quality of the sensor is usually better in a DSLR, and the lenses.........well, no comparison. Get a DSLR.

Alcazar

Thanks,

with the DSLR's, will Lens' from normal SLR's (my dad has an old one with loads of top lens'...I think that's Canon) fit? He has all sorts of filters and fish eye, panoramic things, but I/He has no idea how to use them.

As long as your dad's Canon lenses have the EF fitting (rather than the older FD) then they will fit on the new DSLRs.

On the lenses, as Mungo says.

If you want good image quality, you want a digi-SLR. Marketeers have blinded us with billions of pixels, but there are many other important aspects of image quality that you will find in the physically larger sensors of digital SLRs. Bigger pixels are better. What the guys above have said is true ;)

The very highest image sharpness is generally agreed at 300 pixels per inch. You can't actually see smaller details than that. So if you don't print bigger than 6x4in, then you need only 2.16m pixels total. A 10x7in print is maxed out at 6.3m pixels.

Also, SLR lenses are much better than anything stuck on a zoom-compact.

All of which ends up at a thing called a Canon 350D :D

Cheers,

Richard.

PS Don't confuse pixels-per-inch and printer dots-per-inch - you can't compare them directly (it's complicated ;) ).

Totally off-the-wall suggestion: nip over to Ebay and get yourself a Canon D30 with - that's right - just 3 megapixels. Pools and cars just don't have that much detail.

For professional shots you should be looking at the range of manual controls and other adjustments available: can it connect to an external flash? a remote shutter release? Can I get a lens with the focal length I need? How accurate are the colours?

The D30 has good answers to all those questions and more - it was an £1800 camera just a few years ago and received excellent reviews at the time. Now it can be bought for a fraction of that price, but it's ability to take excellent photos has not, of course, diminished in the slightest. The race for more and more megapixels is, for most people and most purposes, a completely pointless one, but it looks good in the marketing blurb.

The pics below were taken by me using a D30, and I invite anyone to print them out at whatever size they like and tell me there's not enough detail because they're 'only' 3MP. Enjoy :)

http://www.cawte.nildram.co.uk/D30/

totally agree Andy.

you can compare it to the sale of computers and the weighting put on Processor speeds, any processor from the last 2-3 years would be more than plenty for a high percentage of people buying PC's.

Same with digital cameras most people only use them for printing 6x4's and so anything from the last 3 years with 2 or 3Mp will do for most.

but to the original question, get an SLR :)

Mark

Thanks guys, however that's the thing, I'm going to want to print to roughly A3 size from these photos...maybe even a little larger.

D60, then. There's 3 on Ebay right now. Don't pay too much, though, bearing in mind just how cheap the 300D/350D now are new; the D60 has a tendency to sell for a much greater premium over the D30 than is justified IMHO.

I posted this in the Non-scooby related, but was pushed this way :D, I wonder if anyone can help?

I'm after a new camera to take some proper shots. Currently I have a fuji compact which has 6 MP, which is ok, but I would like something with a bit of meat (camera that is). Looking around and I find that Fuji do a camera which has a 9 MP resolution, and is very reasonable price wise (at £400 ish) called the FUJI S9500

http://www.currys.co.uk/images/508210_01_huge.jpg

I know this isn't an SLR, and that's really what I was looking at, but I'm not a pro, and don't know what an SLR is (besides the fact that you can change lenses).

Can anyone reccomend a decent SLR which should be easy enough to use, or would this Fuji cater for my needs of taking pictures of my car, and also taking some pictures for my company (demo photos for display....we currently pay some geezer £500 a day to take posh shots, and I would rather spend the money on a camera and take them myself....how hard is it to take a photo of a pool )

Any help appreciated,

Matt
Matt,

DPreview - www.dpreview.com (http://www.dpreview.com) - gave the S9500 quite a good write up.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilms9000/page15.asp

What no one is mentioning to any real degree here (notwithstanding that they are absolutely correct in that a DSLR will give better results) is that to get the same focal length you will have to add a zoom telephoto to the DSLR "kit" which takes the cost up.

The fugi has an equivelant 28-300 IIRC. You would therefore need a 200mm lens to approximately match that on a cropped sensor DSLR. Not sure about the Nikon, but that would probably be a 55-200 mm Canon Zoom, if you went with the 18-55 kit package.

Makes it much more expensive that the S9500 (buying new) and you have more to carry.

Just something to bear in mind

Cheers guys.

I had a look in currys and they all 'looked' and felt pretty similar. (Nikon D50, Cannon EOS350D, Olympus thingamajig, and the Fuji S9500). The Fuji definitely felt like more of a compact in the way it too it's photos....I think it's because you get the silly beeps, and the picture visible on the screen.

The photos it took were quite nice, but so to were all of them (from first appearances). The canon's did tend to look darker, I don't know whether that's just because the screen contrast/brightness was low. The 3 DSLR's were all very similar, and I really felt like the cameras were quality bits of kit that made all the right clicks and noises. I also have a feeling that the lenses I already have will fit to the canon, which give me a huge incentive to go for that.

Does anyone know if the mastercard offer of £100 back is available in store?

Thanks,

Matt

http://www.canonmastercardpromotion.com/intro.aspx

Thanks guys, however that's the thing, I'm going to want to print to roughly A3 size from these photos...maybe even a little larger.
I have a Nikon D70 with 6.1 MP & I print upto 30x20 inches (through Photobox) and the results are stunning. I was quite surprised how good they were. Biggest I printed with a 6MP Fuji S602 was 10x15, very good again but don't think it would gone much further. Sensor & lens quality is the key here rather than just MP's.

Dave

I can highly recommend the Canon Powershot S2 as an excellent all round camera, thou its not an SLR.
Ease of use for the average photo taker is excellent, and the picture quality from using the Auto mode are very good.

Overall depends what you want from a camera, SLR is a complex and involved method of taking pictures, that involves dedicated lenses, whereas something along the lines of the S9500 and Powershot S2 are easy to use, and give very good results that to most people are better than good enough.

Edit: going to upload some pics soon, have a look.

Matt,

DPreview - www.dpreview.com (http://www.dpreview.com/) - gave the S9500 quite a good write up.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilms9000/page15.asp

What no one is mentioning to any real degree here (notwithstanding that they are absolutely correct in that a DSLR will give better results) is that to get the same focal length you will have to add a zoom telephoto to the DSLR "kit" which takes the cost up.

The fugi has an equivelant 28-300 IIRC. You would therefore need a 200mm lens to approximately match that on a cropped sensor DSLR. Not sure about the Nikon, but that would probably be a 55-200 mm Canon Zoom, if you went with the 18-55 kit package.

Makes it much more expensive that the S9500 (buying new) and you have more to carry.

Just something to bear in mindI've got the 9500, and very please with it. Haven't printed above A4 though.
Image quality is good ennough for me, and you can anchge all the settings you can on a DSLR, plus remote flash and shutter release (vital for night shots!).
I would have for a 350, but for the extra cost of a zoom lense (and the hassle in changing them).
Link to my album with a selection of recent shots, nothing spectacular, but much better than I could have done with my old digicam:

http://photobucket.com/albums/c270/paulwhittle/