13 steps

A digital single-lens reflex camera (digital SLR or DSLR) is a digital camera that uses an automatic mirror system and pentaprism or pentamirror to direct light from the lens through the viewfinder eyepiece.

A man’s got to have a hobby, and this seems to be my new one. For a while now I was started to get annoyed with my Sony Cybershot DSC650. Not that it’s a bad camera as far as compact point and shoot affairs go, it’s small, 7.2 megapixels and makes crispy piccies. But it just started to get a bit limited. For some reason when I browsed around other people’s galleries their photos just seemed more luscious, more dynamic, more colourful. And then there’s the little munchkin we’ve got crawling around. She’s almost 6 months now, and although we’ve already taken thousands of pictures of her it seemed to get harder and harder to get a good one. Babies are just too lively (or ours is anyway), and the image capture time (the time between the moment you click the button and the moment the picture actually gets taken) of the Sony was just too slow. Meaning that when you try and capture that unique moment, or that specific smile, the time between the moment you click the button and the moment the camera takes the picture means that smile, or that moment you wanted to capture is gone.
Reading up on this it appeared that this is a phenomenon typical for normal digital cameras and the only way to ‘fix’ it was to get an SLR. Bloody expensive, and not exactly in the budget right now, but if I waited until we could afford it our girl’ll be going to school…

So the next step was deciding on which one to buy. There’s a LOT of them out there, and a lot of sites specializing in reviews. And like with all sites, it takes quite a bit of time to shift through them and seperate the good sites from the bad, before I could even begin making a decision on which camera to get.
From all the consumer reviews on Amazon it quickly became apparent that it’s not just a simple matter of buying a camera. People usually discern between the body and the lens (or lenses, seeing as you might want to have more specialized for a particular kind of picture). There are a lot of kits available, which will give you a body and a (starter) lens to get started and then later you can shop around for more lenses. But seeing as we’re taking about a big wad of money here I wanted to make sure that the kit I ended up with didn’t just have a good body with all the functions and quality I was looking for, but with a lens that would keep me happy for a long time to come as well. And here’s were things got a bit odd. For some reason there were a lot of people raving about how good the Canon EOS cameras are (the body), but so many of them said the lens that comes with it isn’t worth shit and that you’re either better off getting the body alone (a discount of only about 100,- compared to the kit) or get the kit and buy a ‘good’ lens with it. Either way we’re talking 5-600,- for the body and then another 400 for a decent lens. This seemed a bit ludicrous to me given the amount of money… why a shitty lens? And annoyingly while everybody agreed the lens sucked no one was specific as to why.
That just rubbed me the wrong way.
I did some more reading, Nikon sounded good but too pricey so no thanks, and then I came across a review for the Olympus E-420. Nice kit, good reviews, great lens. Checked out the feaures, they seemed good, but no image stabilization. Meh. Seeing as my wife has a tendency to make blur-o-vision shots this was a must have feature. But ooh, the E-510 has IS, and what’s better, the IS is built into the body instead of into the lens like with Canon. So with the latter you have to pay extra for IS with every lens you get, with Olympus you don’t. Score for Olympus. I read a few more reviews on it and they all seemed to very positive generally speaking, but now I wanted to find a site which had a thorough review on both the E-510 as well as the EOS and WITH an explanation about what exactly was bad about the standard Canon lenses.

The supplied kit lens is a cheap piece of plastic tat that I would be mildly disappointed to find in a Christmas cracker. It lacks contrast, shows significant barrel distortion at its widest setting, and just feels cheap and nasty. It has a plastic lens mount, a rather loose zoom action and the front element tube wobbles when provoked.

There we go, now that’s clear language. Thank you Cliff Smith. Now that I finally knew what sucked about it, let’s see if Cliff has anything to say about the E-510… Ah yeah, there it is. And he loves it.

So, an Olympus E-510 it is.
After some shopping around I managed to get a very sweet deal with not one but two Zuiko lenses in a kit deal. A 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 lens and a 40-150mm f4.0-5.6 lens.