bluefacedpixie

I shopped and bought (well ordered) a new camera this weekend. There’s lots of ramblings after the more.

As narrated in “Run Away“, my Nikon 5700 died after 3 years and I decided to replace it quickly in order to have a camera for our upcoming Mexico vacation. We do have another digital camera: the faithful Konica Minolta Dimage X50. Even though Konica Minolta have recently announced they are exiting the camera business and there is a newer X60 out there I recommend this camera as a point-and-shoot, but as it’s got a few bashes and occasionally suffers from photo-blur itself it doesn’t stand up as our main camera. Even though it’s been doing all of the heavy lifting for the snowboarding and aphotoperday shots this year.

I decided it was time to go DSLR, but the playing field is competitive with not a bad camera in the 2005 DSLR pack.

The two cameras I’ve had some hands on with are the Canon Rebel XT (Ed’s camera) which is small, a little confusing and has great 8MP resolution and the Nikon D70 which Philipa has. I think I like the D70 (Camera of the year 2004) better but it looks like this camera is getting old and the D50 has most of its features for a much better price, is slightly smaller, and comes with an option of 2 kit lenses – 18-55 and 55-200! The 6MP doesn’t worry me too much, as the 5MP of the 5700 and X50 have given me 18×30 posters of my favourite frog without anything to worry about.

I did have a quick look at replacing the 5700 with an EVF camera and in general they have built-in lenses, great features (image stabilization) and tons of pixels. But I’m hoping that the SLR will have more long-term benefit, better manual focus (could never rely on the 5700’s EVF) and in general be more fun.

So I had a look at a bundle of camera’s (liked the Pentax *ist DL in person, was offered a great deal on the very heavy Konica Minolta Maxuum 5D with image stabilization) and plumped for the Nikon D50 (pophoto, dpreview).

Online purchasing is definitely the way to go though: adorama.com (authorized Nikon dealer) has great official prices and no tax (not being in WA) saving almost a couple of hundred dollars in total, so I placed the order with them hoping it’ll be here before the end of the week. Various other sundries are required of course: a new digital SD card, batteries, and UV filters; but I’ll pick them up as required over the next few weeks.

I’ll let you know how the camera is once it arrives.