The price to performance of used cameras is absurd. My view is that digital photography tech hit maturity in 2008 with the release of the Canon 5D Mark II and Nikon D700.
There is an overwhelming amount of professional gear out there at rock bottom prices. Consumer gear can be a blast when it’s cheap enough. The right camera for a style of shooting is going to be better than whatever the newest camera happens to be. (Unless you’re doing sports/action/wildlife. AF tech is getting absurd.)
Third Party Battery Paranoia
I have had batteries fall apart, fail within months, and with a capacity far below what’s on the label. It’s difficult to find good quality third party batteries.
There is an easy way ANYONE can inexpensively capacity test camera batteries. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to capacity test camera batteries. It is a simple DIY project that only requires, ~$30, a screwdriver, and pair of wire strippers.
Picking Out Vintage Lens Winners
All lenses aren’t equal, especially when it comes to vintage and early digital camera lenses. Modern lenses will give you images that are razor sharp corner to corner. Vintage lenses can set themselves apart by how they render, the color you can get with them, interesting bokeh, or other characteristics not valued by current photographers.
On the other hand, many vintage lenses are not good. Their performance may not be good enough to set them apart from other lenses. Worse, as time has gone on some lenses have defects such as haze, fungus, balsam separation, or degraded grease, that will render them worthless because of the difficulty in repair.
I’m somewhat indiscriminate in my purchasing of gear, so I get a mix of good, bad, and average. The lens reviews will help you find a lens worth owning. These are popular film cameras that recieve frequent lens questions.
Lens mounts can have hundreds of compatible lenses. Price lists allow you to quickly narrow down your search.
Comparable lenses tend to have similar uses prices. Specialty/niche use cases can have large differences in price to performance between systems.
Only $20,000 used! Most Expensive: Sigma 200-500mm f/2.8 APO, $25,995. Highest Macro Magnification: 5x, Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Micro Four ThirdsMy favorite because of the quantity of inexpensive quality glass available.
The D40, and other cameras in that series sold millions of units. Everyone stuck with the kit lenses. People that bought these cameras did not buy more lenses.
Nikon didn’t produce a large variety of DX lenses, which were designed for APS-C cameras. This was also done to push hobbyists into the more expensive full frame (FX) lenses and camera bodies.
F-mount lens compatibility is a mess. Not even all DX lenses are compatible with the D40.
The Nikon D40 uses SD memory cards. It can use cards with up to a 32GB capacity.
If you try to use a card with a storage capacity of 64GB or larger, the D40 will have an error. The camera will say the card is full or can not be formatted.
This is because the D40 is only compatible with the SD and SDHC standards. It does not have the hardware required to use the newer SDXC standard, which is used on cards that are 64GB or larger.
The Nikon D700 uses Compact Flash memory cards. 64GB is the maximum card storage capacity that is compatible with the camera.
A CF card larger than 64GB will either not be recognized or cause the D700 to display an error.
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The D60, and other cameras in that series sold millions of units. Unfortunately, everyone that bought APS-C (DX) bodies stuck with the kit lens.
In a chicken and the egg scenario, there aren’t a large variety of DX lenses available. Part of this was due to a lack of demand. The other part was Nikon trying to push people to upgrade to more expensive full frame (FX) lenses and bodies.
The Nikon D90 uses SD memory cards. It can use cards with up to a 32GB capacity.
If you try to use a card with a storage capacity of 64GB or larger, the D90 will have an error. The camera will say the card is full or can not be formatted.
This is because the D90 is only compatible with the SD and SDHC standards. It does not have the hardware required to use the newer SDXC standard that larger cards use.
