Digirtal Cameras, Cars and Cash

Now what would you expect to pay for a digital camera? You can get your dirty mitts on a real nice compact from Nikon (but who would buy a Nikon) with 14 megapixels for a cool 509 dollars, but then what if one wants to take it to the next level with an entry-level Digital SLR...Canon is the obvious place to look and they'll sell you a (not that old) 1000D with a lens for 950-odd bucks. I bet at this point you're wondering 'Where the F*** is he going with this?', but hang in there. My point is that a 1000D is a very potent weapon, and it only costs about a thousand bucks, so why on earth are they also selling 1D's for, sit down, 6,500 dollars, a neat 5 and a half grand more than a 1000d. But one might say, but one of them is the top and the other is the bottom, but they have another 5 cameras, as well as innumerable lens kits (actually 28 different combos to be vaguely accurate), spanning every possible price range.

I'm not saying any of this is bad. All of those cameras are still great bits of photographic machinery, and having a camera for every budget and every whim is a great business move, but...There still remains the problem that there must actually be people in our society blowing 6 and a half thousand dollars on a single camera body, i mean you could get a car with that kind of dough. But it actually gets worse, because Canon also has their Canon 1Ds MArk III (that's a mouthful),for the serious stalker. But you pay a smallish premium for that 's' on the end. Small, as in $5,500, bringing the 1Ds to a neat total of 12,000 dollars.

HOLY SH**!!

You can check my maths at http://www.canon.com.au/products/cameras/digital_slr.html

Part 2: The reasonFor those of you not even vaguely interested in Digital Photography, skip to the next post now!The biggest difference between the 1D and the 50D for example is in the sensor. In the 1D, it captures the scene in fornt of it exactly as it looks, with all the zoom, and effects coming from aperture, exposure and ISO settings and obviously your lens. However, the 50D (and everything below or before it) does not. It actually has a built in zoom factor of 1.6x. This is not going to seem like much except for when you take the fact that this occurs behind the lens. So when you start using 200mm telephoto lenses, you get the effect of using a 320mm lens, and that is noticeable.

There are obviously other things for 11 grand, like much faster start-ups, incredibly fast shutter speeds, better lenses, more settings, features and modes etc etc, but the 1:1 zoom is one of the big drawcards, and i'm not sure Nikon even has that at all, so its an achievement...