chess9:
- Sigma is a cheap lens manufacture that designed & built 6 top of line Zeiss lenses in the mid 80s...so don?t worry about the image quality of today generic lenses, because they will produce just as good as the over price name brand ones. (I have personally tested some of the more exotic lenses among the brands & generics and their qualities are very close under an 8X loop)
Croton:
- Best non-digital camera eh! ...ummm...any 8x10 large format studio/architecture camera...opps! you mean a 35mm
Cheap compact, fixed focal length point & shoot cameras are the Olympus stylus family, that are quite good at the lower end (nice glass lenses, almost as good as SLR).
High end point & shoot is the Contact T series that can be had with Zeiss lenses, are beautifully crafted, but extremely expensive. (give you the quality of SLR images)
35mm SLR lenses are very much the equal in lens quality of every makes & models. The cheaper SLR lenses tend to have plastic aspherics lens instead of exotic glass, and the motor are slow & the lens body construction tend to have poor feel/grip to it.
You have to go to a camera store and ask to try out the diff camera bodies to see how you like each of it weight & feel in you hand, because every body have a diff preference. (All camera body are just black boxes that hold the film in it).
The lens are the important part of the camera, so look for a brand that you can afford, then the lens selection, construction quality, lens speed, focusing speed, other options (Silent motor, APO, Image Stabilizing, etc...).
Personally, my bias lean to ward Canon Lenses, because they have the (USM) quiet and the fastest focusing motor of all camera lenses, they are also mount interchange able with the Canon High8 Video cameras...Canon also have great Image Stabilizing (IS) that are great for hand held sport/outdoor fashion. Eat yer heart out Nikon lovers
