Choose the Perfect Camera

The Advanced Camera

For people who take their photography seriously, a single-lens-reflex model is truly the tool of choice. SLRs can accommodate a variety of fast lenses for shooting portraits, sports, and so on. A large optical viewfinder helps when focusing manually, and the manual controls exceed those offered by cameras that have a built-in lens. Also, SLRs usually have a wider range of shutter speeds and aperture settings than do non-SLRs. The only drawbacks are their larger sizes and higher prices.

Nikon D70

Price: $1100 (with lens)

The 6.1-megapixel Nikon D70 is solidly constructed and comes with a 3.9X zoom lens (equivalent to 27mm to 105mm on a 35mm film camera) that's good for portraits and wide-angle landscape photography. If you already have a film-based Nikon with a set of lenses, you can pick up the D70 body alone for less than $1000 and reuse the lenses you have.

You get seven fully automatic scene modes, such as for portraits and night scenes. But the point of getting an SLR is to exercise manual control--over shutter speed, aperture, white balance, sharpening, contrast, and color settings--and that's what the D70 lets you do. The D70's automatic bracketing permits you to take three shots in succession, with varying exposure or white balance settings, and then select the best one. Many of these adjustments have dedicated controls, and using them is more convenient than diving into the menus on an LCD, as cameras with a fixed lens often require. The Nikon D70 also lets you record files in both JPEG and RAW formats at the same time.

You can typically push the light sensitivity and exposure time on a digital SLR higher than a fixed-lens model allows, so you can shoot night-time cityscapes or indoor portraits with nothing more than the ambient light. The D70's ISO range goes as high as 1600. The camera has a built-in flash that's useful for capturing casual portraits or for filling in dark shadows on a subject's face in bright sunlight; it also has a hot shoe for when you need to attach a more powerful light source.

The D70's rechargeable battery was still going strong when we stopped testing it after 500 shots. Such stamina could come in handy: In continuous mode, the D70 can shoot more than 100 frames at 3 fps.

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Canon EOS 20D

Price: $1450 (with lens)

The 8.2-megapixel Canon EOS 20D offers professional-level features and speed. For example, in the camera's continuous mode, you can shoot up to 5 frames per second for a maximum of 23 shots. The 20D focuses quickly, and its nine autofocus points glow red in the viewfinder when you've locked onto a subject. The predictive focus is fast enough to track a race car as it rushes toward you. The 20D also can take advantage of the fastest CompactFlash cards, which is especially important when you record images simultaneously in both JPEG and RAW formats. Recording RAW files saves the full 12 bits of data per pixel, versus 8 bits per pixel for JPEG files, giving you more data to work with later in image-editing software. But because cameras don't apply their built-in processing--such as sharpening or white balance correction--to RAW files, editing RAW images on a PC can mean more work than tweaking a JPEG image. Typically a JPEG image will suffice for your needs, but it's helpful to have the RAW file when the image requires a lot of editing.

The 20D also has a sensitivity range of ISO 100 to 3200--that's broader than the range of most fixed-lens cameras and far exceeds the Nikon D70's range of ISO 200 to 1600. The extra sensitivity to light at ISO 3200 could come in handy for stopping motion in fairly low natural light. In addition to standard shutter-priority, aperture-priority and full-manual shooting modes, you get seven automatic modes. Most notable is an auto-depth setting that automatically selects foreground subjects using nine focal points, and then chooses a small enough aperture to keep all subjects in focus. This setting worked well in shots of groups of people at various distances from the lens, situations where regular focusing invariably locked onto the background or onto just one of the subjects.

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