Buyer's Guide

Digital SLRs: go pro for less

David Carnoy CNET

Published: 19 Nov 2003

For a while, the trend in digital cameras has been toward pocket-friendly, svelte models with high megapixel counts. Everybody seems to want an ultra-compact, stealthy snapshooter that you can conveniently whip out to capture life's fine (and not-so-fine) moments. And in recent months, manufacturers have obliged with slimmer, better, faster and slightly less-expensive digital cameras.

Canon’s sub-£1,000 EOS 300D is a breakthrough product for the digital SLR market.

But for serious photographers, the real action these days is in the arena of full-bodied digital SLRs. Digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) models, which accept beefy, interchangeable lenses, were once exclusively reserved for professionals who didn't mind shelling out £5,000 - £15,000 to support their livelihoods. But this year, several sub-£1,500 options have hit the market, and Canon has shaken things up further by bringing out its EOS 300D at the consumer-friendly price of £850 (ex. VAT, with a lens).

This year, several dSLRs from Nikon, Olympus and Canon have passed through our offices. But it's hard to pry review units from our reviewers for more than a few minutes, so I hadn't really spent much time shooting with one until I paid my way down to a Canon press event in Miami, where the company was sponsoring two cars in an American Le Mans Series race. Now I understand why they're hard to pry away.

Mainly using a 300mm lens, I started with the EOS 300D, worked my way up to the mid-range EOS 10D (£1,275 ex. VAT, body only); and ended with the gargantuan, professional-grade EOS 1Ds (£5,957 ex. VAT, body only), which was particularly hard to let go of at the end of the race. A 1GB Lexar CompactFlash card and a Canon i960 inkjet printer rounded out my product list.

The results were pretty spectacular (see reduced image samples below), proving that if you have a modicum of talent (and the ability to pluck the 20 best shots from hundreds of pictures), then high-quality equipment will make you look like you're ready to work professionally. OK, maybe not, but a handful of the 8-by-10s that I printed on the i960 were suitable for framing, and they were certainly as good as any photos I've ever taken with a film camera.

Naturally, compared with the 10D and the 300D, the 1Ds was significantly more responsive and captured sharply focused high-speed action images with greater consistency. That said, for everyday shooting, the 300D is superior to the vast majority of non-SLR cameras on the market -- especially if you use it with a versatile zoom lens.

Granted, the prices for dSLR camera bodies haven't come down to those of their film counterparts. A film-based EOS 300 with a lens, for instance, won't cost you more than £350. At the same time, shooting digitally is more cost-effective, and a digital darkroom is a lot easier to create than a film darkroom. In short, if you're serious -- or even semi-serious -- about taking pictures, now is the time to start looking at digital SLRs, particularly if you have a couple of lenses gathering dust with your old film SLR. With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of dSLR contenders that now cost less than £1,500 (inc. VAT) on the street.