Quote:
If leaning toward SLR, it might be worth considering going up a few bucks. I wouldn't buy a Digital Rebel or a D70 when the models up from them are so close in price right now. Here in Toronto you can find a D100 for just a tiny bit more. Though I'm pining for the as-yet unreleased D2X (a lot more).



I don't think this is true, in the UK at least. In the UK at the moment the Digital Rebel (300D) is £479 including the £100 cash back that Canon are offering. The next Canon model up, the 20D, is £1089.

So the next Canon model up from the Digital Rebel is twice the price. To put it another way you could get the Digital Rebel AND the EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
for the same price as the 20D.

I know the Rebel has some cut down features (some of which you can "re-enable" by hacking it), but if I was buying a DSLR at the moment it would be hard to dismiss the Rebel out of hand.

The D70 is £700 over here, so that is much closer to the 20D and the 100D (which is £880).

I personally am happy with my 10D and will be waiting at least until the 30D or whatever the 20D replacement gets called appears.

I just bought my wife the Panasonic DMC-FZ3 for Christmas. With a 35-420mm image stabilized lens with a constant F2.8 apperture it is an amazing feat of packaging. It weighs less than 12 oz !

I don't think I'll be using it much myself though, as it suffers from:

- huge amounts of noise on the images, compared to my 10D
- lousy low light focus performance, again compared to my 10D
- the limitations of the EVF and no optical viewfinder

Of course it cost less than any one of my lenses and weighs less than my lightest lens (by some margin), so it is an amazing camera really. I just don't like it...

...name me another sub £300 camera with a 420mm zoom on it though !

P.S. these aren't manufacturers retail prices, they are taken from http://www.parkcameras.com/ (who I bought my 10D from).
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