How To Choose A Digital SLR

But size has its advantages, too. I find it easier to hold a larger camera steady with a long lens, and bigger bodies have more room for buttons, permitting more camera settings to be made without scrolling through pages of LCD monitor menus. It’s a good idea to hold each camera you’re considering and see how it feels in your hands, and how easy the controls are to operate.

Today’s D-SLRs are surprisingly sturdy. The top pro models are the most rugged, of course, but also expensive and heavy. I’ve taken several tumbles with my original mid-range D-SLR while hiking, including one in which I landed right on the camera, driving the top of its finder into the hard dirt-and-rock trail. Amazingly, the camera still works fine, and the flash unit still pops up and fires on command. Most of today’s D-SLRs are well-built, and should last a long time in normal use.


Operating Speed
Early D-SLRs took a painfully long time to start up and to wake up from the energy-saving “sleep” mode. Today’s D-SLRs are much quicker. Definitely check the start-up and wake-up time in the camera store if “decisive moments” are important in your photography. You can also check the camera specifications on the manufacturers’ Websites.

All of today’s D-SLRs have continuous shooting modes, in which the camera will take a series of images if you hold down the shutter button. How quickly they will shoot them and how many they will shoot before filling their memory buffers varies from model to model and depends on image size (they will shoot more JPEGs than RAW images because JPEGs take up less memory space) and memory-card speed. The fastest of the current D-SLR crop are the Canon EOS-1D Mark II N (8.5 fps) and the Nikon D2x and D2Hs (8 fps).