Foreign Perspectives

In years gone by people might think you a little crazy to buy a professional SLR but at least you could keep taking photos with it for many years to come and indeed I still have my Nikon F3 bought shortly after they came out in 1980 and it takes photos just as well now as it did then.

Digital cameras are a different matter though.

I’ve a couple of photos taken with a professional digital camera way back in 1997. The £2000 camera used to take them was the top of the line at the time and yet these days the 640×480 resolution would be laughed at as even the cheapest of digital cameras can better that.

It’s the same today too. You can spent £3400 on a new Nikon D3 and bask in the luxury of 12.8mp images. On the other hand you could spend around £400 on a Nikon D40X and have pretty respectable 10mp images. That’s not to say that the extra 2.8mp isn’t worth having but rather that chances are that the successor to the D40X will probably cost around the £400 mark and offer it potentially as soon as next year; certainly two years on and the D40X’s successor will have a good deal higher resolution than the D3 and more than likely still be around 10% of the price.

So, as with computers, the best strategy is probably to buy the cheapest DSLR in the range with a view to replacing it in, say, two or three years time with the latest edition of the same model.