Buyers’ Guide - How To Choose An SLR for

Students and Serious Enthusiasts

When you’re a photographic student or a serious enthusiast you have to take a more long term view to choosing a photographic system. You may replace the camera body itself while still in your student days or even early on in your career, but your lenses and some of your accessories are assets that could well last a life-time. Unlike the casual hobbyist, you have professional aspirations or needs and you’ll want to keep as many options open, as well as the capability to pursue the depths of a professional specialisation with all the bells and whistles at hand.

With this in mind, we feel there are only 3 systems worth considering in South Africa: Canon, Nikon and Sony. Sony is a recent addition and not as established as Nikon and Canon, but notwithstanding their inheritance of the Minolta dynasty, they have been impressive in delivering a full-frame professional camera after only 2 years in the game and having quickly scratched up 21 lenses including some very high quality Carl Zeiss and Sony G-type lenses. With their rate of expansion and ability to direct resources, they’re sure to be a contender in the professional market in the very near future.

Tip #1 Start with the lenses

Compare prices, matching quality against quality. We’ve helped out in this regard by providing a comparison basket of the most common lenses bought. This scenario represents the purchases of the typical student or enthusiast building their system of lenses. It is assumed that the buyer begins with an entry to mid-range camera that has an APS-C sensor. Starting from the left column the student would upgrade the standard kit lens to a more versatile and higher quality standard lens before purchasing a budget telephoto lens. These two lenses across all three manufacturers are only suitable for APS-C cameras. When upgrading to a full-frame camera, the telephoto pro and macro lenses will still be useable with that system.

What is interesting to note is that the stabilised lenses offered by Canon and Nikon undercut the Sony lenses (stabilised by the camera) in price. In fact, just adding the standard lens and telephoto budget lens prices for each of the manufacturers, it’s evident that Nikon presents the best offer both in price and in technology specs. All the Nikon lenses in the basket are both stabilised and equipped with silent wave motors (fast-focusing motors). The budget telephoto Canon lens and none of the Sony’s has ultra-fast focus motors. It should also be noted that at the moment there is a lot more variety available from Nikon in the standard lens range for APS-C cameras. To be fair, the Sony standard lens included is rated extremely highly for optical quality and a competent kit lens of 18-70mm exists, meaning many Sony users may not find it necessary to upgrade to the higher quality 16-105mm lens.

Because the Telephoto Pro and Macro lenses are both of high quality and fully usable on both APS-C and full-frame cameras, they are true investments. All three manufacturers provide excellent quality in this segment. Price-wise Canon comes out best with Nikon following closely, but Sony’s offering is somewhat off-the-mark. The difference in price between Canon and Nikon in this segment is actually on the macro lens, on which Nikon include an ultra-fast focus motor and image stabilisation. Image stabilisation is not included on the Canon and an ultra-fast motor is not included on the Sony.

Tip #2 Check on availability of compatible accessories

Even though you’re buying a system and you’re taking lenses into consideration, consider whether you’ll need any additional camera accessories such as battery grips, remote releases and the what kinds of external camera flashes are available.

Tip #3 Megapixels

in reality anything 10 or over is more than adequate. You’re not likely to want to print larger than an A0 poster at this stage, and the extra megapixels won’t really make that much difference to image quality, but in a practical sense they will allow more room for cropping your image – though you really should just learn to compose better!

Tip #4 Image Stabilisation

Firstly, it’s important to really understand what image stabilisation does for you. Simply put, it allows your camera or lens to compensate for the camera shake that normally causes motion blur WHEN SHOOTING AT SLOW SHUTTER SPEEDS. You would only need to shoot at slow shutter speeds in indoor or dim lighting conditions, so it’s good for events, night photography or natural light portraiture. It’s a must if you’re pursuing photojournalism, but not if you’re a studio photographer or sports photographer. If you do need this technology, there are two kinds available – both equally as effective. In-camera or CCD-shift technology performs the stabilisation in the camera so that all lenses attached to it are automatically stabilised. Manufacturers that use stabilisation in the lens require you to buy separate image stabilised lenses.

Tip #5 Focus Points

This is something that obviously only applies to autofocus, but considering how difficult it has become to manually focus on most modern digital lenses, this is actually quite important. The more focus points the camera has, the more likely it is to accurately and efficiently autofocus.

Tip #6 Frames per Second

This performance rating determines the speed at which the camera can capture consecutive pictures. This is a function of the image processor and in actual fact is not indicative of the quality of the camera since it requires a lot of processing power to produce high frame rates and this is often a trade-off with picture size (megapixels), bit depth and other functions. Do not worry about the frames per second rating if you do not intend to capture fast action such as in journalism and sports photography applications. Sometimes cameras are actually designed with different applications in mind, with some bearing higher megapixel ratings but slower frames per second capability than others. Most cameras however, particularly in the entry to mid-range are designed to be well balanced between image quality and speed.

Tip #7 Bit Depth

It’s becoming the new marketing tool in digital camera features with most manufacturers now breaking the traditional 12 bit sampling rate with 14 bit and even higher analogue-to-digital converters in their image processors. Higher bit depths allow your camera to distinguish more tonal levels, essentially recording more shades of each colour than a lower bit depth. No matter what bit depth the raw image is recorded on, the JPEG format is only 8 bit. Distinguishing between 12 and 14 bit depth is a topic of hot debate. Many report no discernable difference, and in a well exposed picture this is true, however there is slight improvement in picture smoothness in significantly under-exposed pictures. When performing drastic image editing manipulations, it’s always better to have more information in your pictures while working in raw format than not. The conclusion – 14 bit Is slightly better, but it ‘s not worth being a big consideration if the dynamic range – the range between the darkest and lightest tones that can typically be captured by the image sensor – is not expanded.