Hiya everyone,
4. Picture quality...think we have a 6 mega pixel point and shoot. Cant say Im very impressed with the quality of the pictures, even when you get it just right.
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There are many more factors that determine the quality of a picture than just megapixels. There's no use having 10, or 100 megapixels if they're all "low quality" megapixels. If you're not going to be cropping your photos, do you really need dozens of megapixels? 1024x768 is less than 1 megapixel, Full HD (1920x1080) is 2 megapixels.* If you're email or uploading photos online, or having them printed as normal sized photos, do you think you'll be able to notice the difference between 6 and 60 megapixels?
I had a 5 megapixel point and shoot, my dSLR has 8. That 60% extra megapixels brought nowhere near 60% better image. The photos on my dSLR looked better for other reasons.
There are several reasons why dSLRs (usually) take better quality photos than point an shoots:
1. The sensor on a dSLR is much, much larger. Other things being equal, if you're taking a photo of the same thing, more light falls on the dSLR's sensor. More light = bigger signal = less noise. This is one of the reasons that dSLRs perform better at higher ISOs (light sensitivity) than point and shoots.
Sensor chart: The lower end dSLRs use a 1.5 or 1.6x crop factor. Guess which sizes most point and shoots are
2. Because dSLRs have bigger sensors, they have a shallow depth of field. Depth of field is the part of the photo that is in focus. If you have a shallow or thin depth of field, you can take photos where your subject is in focus and everything out gets more blurred the further away it is from your subject.
3. More of an opinion than a fact, but the lenses on SLRs are better: you'll have less distortion (straight lines looking curved), chromatic abberation (purple (and other colour) fringes that didn't exist as the scene looks in real life), and less softness. They also in conjunction with the dSLR body, have faster auto-focus, meaning less time between when you press the shutter button and the camera actually takes the photo.
4. dSLR lenses are "faster". Lenses have apertures, these function like your eyes' iris: the wider open they are, the more light they let in. When you take a photo, the wider open this aperture is, the less time the shutter has to stay open. If you take a photo of someone and they come out blurry, either it's because you moved the camera or because the shutter was open so long that it recorded their motion. You'll be able to take less blurry photos of people because you can open the aperture wider as well as being able to use a higher ISO.
5. The ability to use different lenses. If you have a SLR, you can have one lens for wide angle landscapes, one for everday use, one for close up portraits of people, a long zoom lens for taking photos of animals and a macro lens for taking photos of flowers and insects. A point and shoot doesn't have that versatility. The more they try to have the lens perform well at all these features, the more compromises they have to make. Either the picture will look worse, or the price of the lens will.
6. The ability to use better flash guns (although some point and shoots do have flash hotshoes). The flash on a point and shoot is usually horrible because:
a) It's close to the lens. The closer to the lens, the easier it is to get the red eye effect
b) You can't tilt the flash. You have to fire it straight at the subject. It's like shining a torch straight into someone's face.
c) They output of the flash is weak and can't light up very fast
d) The light all comes from a small source and is sharp and casts hard shadows
Most people grow to hate flash because the flash on their point and shoot gives horrible washed out photos of people, with red eyes and pitch black backgrounds. Using a dSLR and a flash gun, you can bounce the flash off the wall, off the ceiling or off a reflector, as well diffuse the light (spread it over a larger area, so the light appears to be coming from a larger source, which makes it softer with less harsh shadows)
The only thing a p&s can do better is fit in your pocket.
And not ravage your wallet
Personally, for R3000-4000, I'd pick up a second hand dSLR. I use a Canon EOS 350D and I paid about R3300 for it. The one P&S I have my eyes on at the moment is the Canon S90, but it's closer to the R5000 range, as are most of the Canon G series which are highly rated and popular even among SLR users who can't be bothered to carry their SLRs everywhere.
* Most digital still cameras (there are a few exceptions, i.e. the Sigma DP range) only record one colour (out of Red, Green, Blue) per pixel, whereas a computer monitor displays 3 colors (again, RGB) per pixel. The camera (or software on the PC) then guesses the other 2 colours using a "
Bayer filter". That's why most photos will look better when you resize them down, because instead of interpolating data for pixels that were never recorded in the first place, you're averaging available existing data.
Thanks.
You could get a 18-200mm lens that covers a nice wide range of "zoom", but that will be pricey. For most shots, a 18-55mm kit lens will be fine.