Nikon or who to buy for digital slr camera?

Me and my daughter are looking to buy digital slr cameras, she for school course so varied work and me for walking landscape birds, planes etc looking at nikon, and the other big boys it is so expensive and confusing, is there any alternative manufacturers with good quality and better price, russian? Chinese? Or any advice please? Regards

Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax and Olympus.

Work out a budget and find a dealer who'll let you handle a couple of candidates.

Unfortunately, unless you go used it's going to be pretty expensive.

No

Big boys or small, the design and manufacture pretty much costs about the same.

Acutally the Nikon D3100 is a good choice for a first camera with its standard 18-55 mm lens will do most of what you and your daughter need to do until you can afford to buy a second lens like the 55-200 mm.

Budget $650 for the camera and lens and another $25 for a couple of 4 gb memory cards.

I hope you have a computer with a rather large hard drive so store your images and a DVD burner to backup all your shots.

Sony and Pentax are the "alternative" manufacturers but their prices aren't cheaper and their quality isn't any less (in many aspects it's better). They also don't have as inexpensive of lower tier products as Canon and Nikon because they don't produce as wide a range of models since they sell fewer. The exception at the moment is if you can find a Sony SLT a33 - it was recently discontinued and is being sold for $500-$550 for the kit with lens down from around $700 when it first came out. It's a great camera and a great deal if you can still track one down.

The cheapest DSLR you will find new is the Canon Rebel T3 which is being sold for under $500 and I've seen it for as little as $400 for the kit with lens. A lot of camera sellers seem to have awesome sals online right now so browse around and see what you can find - look at Amazon, B&H, Adorama, Bedford's Camera and Video (I can vouch for them being a frequent shopper of their locations in Arkansas as well as online). If you're looking for some knock off super cheap brand it probably doesn't exist and if it does you don't want to waste your money on it. It's better to get used. You can find used cameras at KEH.com.

When I decided to go back into a Digital Single lens reflex I was in the boat as you. Having sold all previous equipment, I decided to go into the Pentax brand. First I was annoyed at the fact there was so much gobbly-goop in the view finder and 5 focusing squares, in the Canon. I wear glasses and this was just too busy for me. While researching the pentax I found that the stabilization mechanism is contained in the camera bodies not in each lens. This made the lenses lighter, and cheaper to my way of thinking. Also the Pentax will accept a great many lenses that were made for Pentax film cameras, so buying an older lens that I may use infrequently, but was for a specialized purpose was also attractive to me. If you decide to go Pentax buy the camera body with the lens plus the 50mm-to-200mm lens, altogether. I just purchased the camera with one lens and when I compared my amount spent, I would have been better off getting the camera with the two lenses in the first place.

The Canon 600D is a fantastic camera both for the photographer and the independent film-maker. The Canon 600D (T3i in the US) is an absolutely sensational camera. It shoots video really well and the finished clips look OUTSTANDING. This is the first time I have used SD cards and Digital SLR for film, and I have to say I'm really impressed with the quality that the '600D' produces.