Regarding Purchase of a DSLR or Mirrorless Camera

Shanpats27

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Jan 21, 2016
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Hello,

I am 16 and I love Photography. I am a photography enthusiast. I own a galaxy S7 and I take a lot of Photos from it but they are just like Point and shoot. Well I also experiment with the Pro mode but I am in Hunger for more. Can anyone Please suggest me a Good DSLR or a Mirrorless camera.
My budget is 500$.

Thank You.
 
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timeconsumer

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Nov 28, 2011
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Canon vs Nikon. Choose your fate now, because it's difficult to switch brands unless you want to buy all new lenses. FWIW I think they're pretty much the same. You can usually get a decent deal on body + an 18-55mm lens for both brands. Some kits throw in a 75-300 telephoto, it's nice to have but I don't think it's necessary for the average beginner. Usually an 18-55 kit lens and a nice prime lens like a 35mm or 50mm is a good starter set.

I would look for a T5 or SL1 in the Canon family or a D3200 or D3300 in the Nikon family. Go cheaper if you want to leave yourself room to buy a second lens. A Canon 50mm f/1.8 is maybe $60.
 

Shanpats27

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Jan 21, 2016
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I dont have to much technical knowledge about camera's. I had a look at the Sony Alpha A6000. Is it good? I want a compact well built Dslr with Excellent picture quality for the price
 
I'm not sure you know what you want. You say you want an interchangeable-lens camera, but your budget is very limited, you want it to be compact, and you want excellent picture quality. Do you really want an interchangeable-lens camera (I'll call them DSLRs, even though it now includes mirrorless bodies)? Or do you just want a fixed-lens point-and-shoot which is cheap, compact, with excellent picture quality?

The usual way people "get into" photography is to go from the cell phone camera to a point-and-shoot which gives you most of the additional control and somewhat higher image quality you're looking for. The step up to a DSLR is a huge one - much larger camera, much more flexibility, much higher image quality, much more complexity, and much higher price. Are you sure you want to skip this middle step?

While it's possible to buy a single super-zoom, stick it on DSLR body, and shoot with it all the time that way, it's a big waste of money. The whole point of buying a DSLR is so that you can change the lenses. The super-zooms, especially to fit a $500 budget for camera + body, are very low quality. You see, the better picture quality of DSLR comes from the significantly larger image sensor. But the larger image sensor requires a proportionately bigger lens to yield the same image field of view. And the price of a lens scales with its surface area (how much grinding is needed to fabricate the lens). So DSLR lenses get expensive really quickly.

If you seriously get into photography with a DSLR, you're probably going to end up with a wide-angle zoom, a wide-aperture fixed focus, and a telephoto zoom as a minimum. A good set of those lenses alone will run you over $2000. Cheaper versions of the set will cost you around $500, but the image quality will be worse than most fixed-focus point-and-shoots (except for the fixed focus lens low-light photography). If you seriously get into it, it's easy to build up a collection of lenses costing $5000 or more. And that's not even including the body yet. A cheap body will be around $300, with the high-end bodies topping $3000.

As mentioned, because the lens mounts are proprietary, if you decide to get a DSLR, you have to pick your system now. Canon, Nikon, Four-thirds, or Sony E-mount (the A6000 is an E-mount). Once you start investing in lenses for that mount, you're committed to that system. Switching systems means you have to sell all your old lenses and get all-new ones, not just switch the body.

So are you sure you want to get a DSLR right now, while you're still learning? This used to be a lot easier in the film photography days. Canon and Nikon were the only choices, and the rate of technological progress in bodies was very slow. So you could buy a body with a cheap lens, and spend a decade or more collecting lenses for it (using the same body for a decade or more). But today new bodies gain new features much more quickly. If you're still in the "learning what a camera can do" phase, any body you buy today will likely be outdated and worth very little in 3-5 years. So getting a DSLR when you aren't yet sure what you want will be a lot like getting a fixed-lens point-and-shoot.

Unless you're absolutely certain you want a DSLR now and are ready to pick a lens system, I'd suggest getting a cheap point-and-shoot as an interim step. Something like a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200 or FZ300 or used Canon Powershot G. That has most of the controls you'll find on a DSLR, plus RAW capability to introduce you with the photo processing workflow (shoot raw instead of JPEG, organize and do some simple processing of your photos, create JPEGs). It'll help you learn what all the controls are for, what lens focal lengths you like to shoot at, what sorts of features you like to use or don't care about, which will all help you make a better more informed choice when you're ready to upgrade to a DSLR. At the rate new features are coming out on bodies, by the time you outgrow the interim camera, the money you lose will be about the same as the depreciation on a DSLR body. So it won't cost you any more than getting a DSLR now (unless by some miracle you happened to pick the exact DSLR and lens system you wanted for future use).

B&H Photo is the most reliable online photo retailer. Adorama is second. There are a few other good ones, but most of them are scam shops. Check them out on resellerratings.com first before ordering from them.
 

Shanpats27

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Jan 21, 2016
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First of all let me tell u that u are going to deep into the topic. Photography is my hobby not my profession. I dont know lots of technical stuff in photography. I know just the basics. Let me make it straight.

I want an upper midrange Dslr with interchangeable lenses. In the beginning the kit lens will do fine. Atleast i will learn with that kit lens and improve my photography skills. Then i can proceed to get a professional quality Lense for Crisp image quality.

I have tried point and shoots and that kind of photos are delivered to me by my Galaxy S7. Getting a point and shoot like the sony Rx 100 series is a waste of money since i can get a dslr in that price.

Please suggest me a dslr with interchangeable lenses, good image processing and compactness like the alpha series from sony.


Thank you.
 

Hello man

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Aug 11, 2013
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I am 16 myself. I currently have a Nikon D600 as my main body and sometimes use a D300 for applications where having a crop factor/8 FPS makes sense. It's 51 point AF is also pretty capable. Honestly, buy some used stuff. I don't actually own a single new body or lens. I don't see it as being all that worth it. The D600 is old (2012) but had a good sensor in the first place, and hasn't become obsolete.

Contrary to Solandri, the cheap entry level zooms can be good. I used a DX 55-200mm F/4.5-5.6 for quite a while when I had my D3200. It was actually sharper than my 70-200 F/2.8 I now use. It wasn't great in low light applications, and certainly wasn't capable of being used in the rain for hours with no cover when shooting sports, but hey, it worked for me then. I since left the D3200 behind, and moved to better bodies and different lenses. I intend to become a USAF combat photographer, so it don't really plan on ditching my hobby any time soon. I figure investing here and there in more gear isn't a bad idea. Depending on what you shoot, a 50mm can be your ONLY LENS. I don't love the 50mm focal length for a lot of things, but it is a jack of all trades so to speak. The wide max aperture helps overcome the lackluster ISO performance of most crop sensor cameras (this refers to the sensor size, bigger sensors physically gather more photons of light).

When I first got my D600, all I had was an old 50mm 1.8 AF-D. Matt Granger makes a great point in his budgetography series using a Nikon 1DX to take some amazing photos. That camera coupled with a Samyang 85mm F/1.4 manual focus lens that he uses is a great setup actually. I have pondered buying a D1X myself after having watched it-it's cool! That camera is from 2001!!! It honestly sucks by modern standards! But you can make anything work, and often working with limitations forces you to really get photography down and not rely on equipment too much.
 
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