Chuck, I have the Canon Digital Rebel (one of those that Rob mentioned). I bought the camera a little bit before a model change. Mine's 8 megapixels: the current model is 10. That's not enough of a difference to be easily noticeable, but they did add new hardware to clean the sensor. I bought mine through Amazon and got some of the accessories through their partner vendors. Amazon's prices were the best I found for non gray-market goods. You'll have the option of buying the camera body separately, or buying it with a kit lens. I bought the camera body and then picked up the USM-II 28-105mm lens. You could compare the kit lens to the general plossl that gets tossed in with a scope. The USM that I bought is a very good mid-quality lens. There's another very high quality series that goes for a chunk more money. I lust, but cannot currently justify the expenditure. Counting extra battery, camera case and a couple of 2-Gig compact flash cards, I got in for a smidgen under $1000. At the time, there was a rebate (now gone) that returned $100 of that. I'm not sure that you'll beat that by much, once you've added in the basic accessories you'll need. Olympus has a couple of DSLRs for a few bucks less, but the images don't compare to the Canon. One of the things you have to account for is the fact you'll need high-speed compact flash cards. These are faster (and pricier) than the garden variety CF and you'll appreciate the speed. A DSLR dumps a lot of data for each image (RAW images on mine typically run 5-6 megabytes), and a fast card will help you get ready for the next shot. My camera will shoot the first 3 shots in about 1 sec--after that, it's about a shot a second. The higher-end DSLRs will shoot a lot faster than that. Rob points out the fact that the camera body is a bit on the small side. I've seen some reviewers complain about that, but I've got larger-than-average hands and it's not a problem for me. The button layout is reasonably sensible, and you can get a shot set up within a couple of seconds once you learn the layout. DSLRs are really cool. You can shoot in the RAW format which captures nearly all of the sensor data (more than the TIFF or JPEG formats can carry), so you've got multiple opportunities to work with a shot long after you've taken it. Rob's given me some helpful tips in that regard. If you've got the bandwidth, contact me offline and I'll send you some shots I've taken with mine. Michael On Dec 17, 2006, at 9:47 PM, Chuck Hards wrote:
After 35 years of avid emulsion-based photography, I'm about to take a serious digital plunge, something better than Webcam & camera-phone resolution. Trolling for suggestions, looking for a commercial camera that fills a similar niche to the classic 35mm SLR that I am used to. I want to use it for some astro-photography as well as terrestrial, family snapshots, etc. I suspect there will be some good deals after Christmas. I don't want to break the bank, can we keep it under say, $700?
Suggestions? Thanks in advance.