nikon d50 vs olympus e-500 vs canon 350d (vs nikon d70?)

[mtclimber]

Personally, I do a lot of low light level shooting and the noise signature of the Nikon D-50 is much better than the Olympus E-500. The D-50 also has a wider selection of Nikon and thord party lenses.

MT

[jnrob]

Hi Elger,

I think all DSLRs will take good pictures. I myself have a KM5D.

IMHO, the 2 major points against the E500 are the noisy high ISO performance and the limited and pricy choice in lenses. The other brands have better high ISO performance and offer cheap f1,7 50mm primes, very useful to shoot low light indoors (as in a theatre).
So the E500 is not a good choice for your intended purpose.
I should point out that getting a cheap 50mm Minolta or Pentax 50mm prime is increasingly difficult and mostly a 2nd hand affair (I got my Minolta 50mm on eBay).

[ruchai]

I think it is very easy to decide.

Camera body isonly a part of the DSLR. You will need lenses. Canon and Nikon are the only companies that have many lenses for you to choose from.With Olympusyou will have trouble looking for lenses to meet your exact requirements. I think you should forget Olympus.

Canon 350D and Nikon D50 should be ok for your requirement. You will not sorry for decided on any of the two. D50 is a newer model and hence has more new technologies. Unless Canon reduce the price to below that of the D50 there is no reason to choose Canon.

I suggest you should spend your times choosing the lenses for your D50.

My suggestion is valid only as of today. I am sure Canon will launch a new model that will be equal or better than D50 soon. If Iwere you I shall not wait. The D50 is a very good and very reasonably priced DSLR.

Attached picture was taken withmy D50 and MacroNikkor 60mm. The D50 will take any type of picture you will ever want. I now also have a D200 but still keep and use my D50. I love it.

[Elger]

one of the few things that's keeping the olympus still at the number 1 position, is the fact that it can take black and white pictures. the people at the store thought this was silly of me, but I like taking black and white pictures, and not adding the black and white effect later (it kind of forces me to think, if that makes any sense). the big drawback of the d50 to me now is that it doesn't seem to have this function - as far as I can tell. am I correct?

[Norm in Fujino]

ruchai wrote:

I think it is very easy to decide.

Camera body isonly a part of the DSLR. You will need lenses. Canon and Nikon are the only companies that have many lenses for you to choose from.With Olympusyou will have trouble looking for lenses to meet your exact requirements. I think you should forget Olympus.

Huh? Yes, I guess there are "many more" lenses available for Canon and Nikon, but so what? Remember, not all of them were designed for the formats and media they are used on, and do not necessarily provide the kind of performance everyone wants or needs.

Did you know that Olympus has more lenses specifically designed for digital than any other manufacturer? Does this make their lens selection "superior"? Not necessarily, no, but sheer numbers of lenses in any format doesn't mean much, either.

Everyone has his/her own needs and requirements, and the 4/3 format has the ranges covered pretty well. Also, adapters are available to allow the use of an incredibly wide range of legacy lens from other manufacturers on 4/3 cameras when manual focus is used. That makes a wide range of lenses indeed.

Remember also that five of Sigma's top lenses will come on the market in 4/3 format within a few months. People may want to go to other manufacturers for any number of reasons, but sheer number of lenses shouldn't be one of them. Remember, too, that only Olympus has an effective countermeasure against sensor dust, and in-camera pixel mapping.

[ennacac]

For low noise at high ISO check out the Pentax DS2 or DL as it has lower noise than anything mentioned including the D50.

Tom

[jnrob]

Elger wrote:

one of the few things that's keeping the olympus still at the number 1 position, is the fact that it can take black and white pictures. the people at the store thought this was silly of me, but I like taking black and white pictures, and not adding the black and white effect later (it kind of forces me to think, if that makes any sense). the big drawback of the d50 to me now is that it doesn't seem to have this function - as far as I can tell. am I correct?

about B&W: in the digital world, it is much preferable& powerfulto take your pictures in color and then process them into B&W. This allows you to play with the 3 color channels to achieve different B&W tonalities. The digital equivalent of using color filters on B&W film:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...lack-white.htm

While on film you would have to decide which filter to use beforehand, in digital you can play with the 3 channels till you get the desired effect. Note that you don't need Photoshop's channel mixer for this. You can achieve a similar effect in your raw converter by setting the saturation to zero and playing with the color balance.

[jnrob]

[ruchai]

Elger wrote:

one of the few things that's keeping the olympus still at the number 1 position, is the fact that it can take black and white pictures. the people at the store thought this was silly of me, but I like taking black and white pictures, and not adding the black and white effect later (it kind of forces me to think, if that makes any sense). the big drawback of the d50 to me now is that it doesn't seem to have this function - as far as I can tell. am I correct?

With modern DSLR you choose b&w in your pc while processing the pictures. Your pc is more powerful than the computer in any DSLR. What I did here was loaded the color picture back to Nikon Capture4 and click at "B&W".

[Elger]

alright, making it even more difficult now, and I might be about to say something horrible, but a good friend of mine who is a photographer recommended a fuji finepix s9500 (s9000z) as opposed to an entry level slr... opinions?