4 Cameras Middling Only in Price

Little silver pocket cameras are small and cheap, they take movies, and they don’t turn you into a tourist cliché by dangling from your neck.

But those big black digital single-lens reflex cameras take much better photos, thanks to a much larger light sensor and vastly superior light sensitivity. They also offer gorgeous soft-focus backgrounds, zero start-up time, no shutter lag, impressive burst modes of several shots a second, twice the battery life and interchangeable lenses.
Last year was a big year for S.L.R.’s. New players like Sony and Panasonic entered the market. Prices dropped to new lows — you can get an excellent starter model for under $475. And as the year ended, four new semipro models had their debuts, defining a new midrange category ($1,300 to $1,800) almost overnight: the Nikon D300, Canon 40D, Sony A700 and Olympus E3. Thanks to the technology trickle-down effect, they offer many features of $5,000 professional S.L.R. models at a fraction of the price.
These cameras make you understand why people get hooked on photography. It starts with the feel of the huge, rugged body in your hands, a shape that’s been refined over the decades. It continues with the satisfying, instantaneous click of the shutter —not the chirpy audio recording from a pocket camera’s speaker, but the actual clack of the S.L.R.’s mirror snapping out of the way. (The Nikon D300’s snap is especially satisfying.)
At these prices, you also get burst-mode speeds of five or six shots a second. It’s not just for sports and wildlife; that speed is also great for portraits, because you can choose from multiple gradations of smile and expression.
The new Nikon, Olympus and Canon cameras offer something that’s been missing on S.L.R.’s until recently: live view. That’s where you compose the shot on the screen, just as you can on a pocket camera, rather than holding the camera to your eye.
Live view permits angles and heights that are impossible with the camera pressed to your face. Live view also helps with manual focusing, since you can magnify the preview on the screen.
And live view in most of the cameras lets you see changes in exposure, white balance and depth of field before you actually snap the shot.
Unfortunately, using live view entails compromises like delays in focusing and limited features; for example, the Canon can’t autofocus in live-view mode or use any of its scene modes (like Sports or Portrait).
All four of these cameras are supposed to shake off any dust that might have wandered onto the sensor during a lens change. (For Nikon, that’s a first.) That’s a relief to anyone who’s been getting shadow dots in the same place on every photo.
So here they are, in alphabetical order: the latest midrange S.L.R.’s in the $1,300 to $1,800 bracket — lens not included. A comparison table appears at nytimes.com/tech.(All the cameras accept the cheap and capacious Compact Flash cards; the Olympus also takes XD cards, and the Sony also takes Memory Stick Duo.)

DAVID POGUE's full article is available at nytimes.com

And see this Comparison Chat: Digital Single-Lens Reflex Cameras: A Comparison Chart

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