This is the politically incorrect part of this site. Sarcasm and irony intended. This should not be taken too seriously of course.Subjects have to do with prejudice, wrong ideas, strange marketing strategies, controversial subjects and many others... to be followed.
Pixels are all that matters (or maybe not)
many people buy camera's based on megapixels. That's because many manufacturers sell camera's based on megapixels. You want more because they make you think you need more so they give you more. The truth is that you'll need a certain amount of pixels to be able to print at a certain size with a reasonable resolution. So resolution can be important depending on the size of your printouts. 10MP, becoming the standard size, will allow you to print excellent crisp pictures on an A3, but who is printing at that size (well, I do). By the way, my 6MP pics were pretty decent even on A3. Moreover, MPs are not everything, because there are MPs and MPs. The quality of the pixels (noise in the picture, absence of filtering in the camera, local processing in the sensor, CCD, CMOS) does matter too. A printout from a 4MP camera like the D2H may look much better than a printout from a 10MP bridge camera. But at the end, what you want is a lot of high quality pixels. Personally I now think that pixels DO matter: having a high end camera with a reasonable high ISO performance is an excellent tool because it will give you more freedom to be able to print large size printouts while retaining the possibility to crop and recompose afterwards without much loss. A lower resolution camera will show its limitations when cropping.
Primes are better than zooms (are they)
in fact this might have been true in the past. Primes had a simple design (less glass, easier to calculate) and hence delivered better picture. But with the introduction of sophisticated computer aided design methods have made zoom design easier and much better. Prime lenses outperform most consumer grade lenses by far, but this is not true anymore for recent pro-grade lenses like the 17-55 or the 28-70 2.8 lenses. One advantage of prime lenses: they are usually faster than the equivalent focal length in a zoom. You won't find 1.4 or even 1.8 or 2.0 zooms, the fastest are 2.8 lenses. Superlong zooms are not available (only exceptions 120-300 2.8 Sigma and 200-400VR 4.0 Nikkor) and you are stuck to primes if you need fast and long glass.
A few subjects to come:
- A pro-body will give you better pictures
(maybe not)
- Put a UV filter in front of all your lenses (or not)
- Nikon High ISO is bad - the "truth" about it
- High ISO performance is all that matters
- Why are prices going down and why is it always the wrong moment to
buy a camera body
- Why should you buy expensive lenses
- Why a tripod is better than VR/OS, better than nothing (or is it the
other way around)
- Why auto modes don't really work and why should you become a
photographer
- Why the number game, always longer, bigger, faster, ...
- What can we expect in the coming generation
- What is the typical Nikon lifecycle and what is their (supposed)
strategy
- What is the difference between Nikon and Canon shooters - typical
prejudice (joke)
- Why are manufacturers pulling our leg (pricing, availability,
warranty, world
economy)
Any suggestions welcome