A new camera

It was time for a dSLR

Written on 07/20/2011 by Patrick Bregman

After I got my Sony HX5V a little while ago (almost 9 months) I decided that it was time to get myself a new camera. The primary reason for this was that even in pictures which should be just fine I could find a lot of color noise. And even otherwise just fine images had a smoothing filter applied. I can only guess why this is happening, but I expect it to have something to with other artifacts which will otherwise become apparent.

Since I wanted something that looked a bit more pro, I decided to go for a dSLR. After paying the local photoshop a visit to try a few and asking a few friends for advice, I decided that it was gonna be a Nikon. There is no real reason for this choice, if my friends advised Canon I might have gone with that. I tried the few "budget" options (Nikon D3100, Nikon D5000, Nikon D5100). While these felt a little bit better than the Canon ones, it still wasn't quite right somehow. This made me look at cameras that where priced a bit higher. I had the choice between the Nikon D90 (released in 2008, dropped significantly in price) and the Nikon D7000 (recently released, successor to the D90). Both of them are a bit bigger than the "budget" options, and I like this.

Because of budget considerations I went with a Nikon D90. The only thing I had to decide on then was which lens I'd order with it. I looked all around the internet for reviews for lenses. My first choices where:

  • Tamron AF 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 Di-II LD Aspherical (IF) MACRO - Has it all, from wide angle to telezoom
  • Sigma AF 28-300mm F3.5-6.3 SLD DG Macro - Can you say "very large zoom"?
  • Nikkor AF-S DX 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED VR - Less zoom, but better aperture

After reading all the reviews I found of these and much other lenses it kinda appeared like every single one of them has a lot of problems, especially the superzooms. Based on this and the fact that the reviews for the Nikkor were a bit more positive than the rest I decided to go with the Nikkor lens. Though I do have to say that I intend to play around with the Nikkor until I find out which focal lengths I use most and then get lenses for those focal lengths. That still is far, far in the future though.

To conclude this post, let me put a picture of the camera + lens and a link to my Flickr stream:

Nikon D90

A few of the pictures I've already shot with this camera can be found on my Flickr

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