Digital SLR Decision

In some areas I've always been an early adopter. Photography hasn't been one of those areas in a long time. I've stuck with 35mm film for serious picture taking while using small point and shoot digital cameras when convenience was more important than quality. No more. I've decided to make the leap to Digital SLR Photography. I've given most of my 35mm cameras to a local school's photo program.

My 35mm cameras have always been Pentax and I have a good selection of their lenses. As such, I really wanted to love the new Pentax K10D. I read the dpreview.com review got discouraged, mostly over the sharpness or lack thereof. I am moving to digital partly because of convenience and I don't want to have to work at each and every picture doing my own RAW conversions to get good images.

Since Pentax started looking less interesting (and then the Hoya-Pentax merger got announced, creating more doubt), I looked next at Canon. My point and shoot digitals are Canon and I've been pleasantly surprised with the image quality and color handling. I took a good look at the new Digital Revel XTi and almost bought it. It came up short on a few features I was interested in so I also looked at the higher end Canons but none was the perfect set of features. The 5D lacks a simple built-in flash -- I know the pro models usually don't include this but convenience is important to me, remember -- I won't always have a separate flash unit with me.

I finally settled on a Nikon D80. It got great reviews and I liked the balance of ease and capability when I tried it out. It was easy finding one right after the holidays but I will be picking one up tomorrow. Nikon also offers the perfect single lens for most of my needs but that is sold out everywhere and it looks like it will be for a while. I'll always want a few great lens for when the quality is that important but this 18-200mm AF DX VR lens is vibration reduction equipped, light, covers a huge 27 to over 300mm equivalent range and makes it possible to get most of the D-SLR quality without a bag full of lenses. This is especially important when I'm travelling on business and need to fit the camera gear in with the tools of my trade (laptop, cellphone, etc.).

Since my love of photography is being rekindled, I plan to post images and write about photography more on this site. Check back for hands on reports on using the D80 and general digital photography tips and tricks.