How to choose a camera?
Buying a camera can be extremely complicated these days, with so much to choose from. It's good in a way, bad in another way. However, a logical thinking can help arrive at a decision rather quickly.
(1) Budget - Look at the budget and get what best you have
within that budget. When it comes to cameras and such I don't see the point in buying the latest and the greatest (except may be when you are a photographer of world fame
).
Anything you buy now become obsolete in a few months. So why to chase a moving target?
(2) Tech - This is exact opposite of the above line of thought. This school of thought is - you should always be at the front of the technology. Technology moves so fast; what's the point in buying something which is already obsolete.
Now out of the two none is a right approach or a wrong approach. It's person to person. So make a decision here.
(3) Feature - This is most often what people don't understand, and need help with to make a decision. The list of features a camera has, it's usefulness and so on.
I remember there was a time there used to be wars between different camps about which camera one should buy. Specifications, and more importantly, their interpretation can be misleading. Ignorance doesn't help either. A lot of people would recommend wrong options simply out of their ignorance about certain features, it's utility in general and for a specific user etc.
Luckily, things have changed, for good, in the photography world. Now there is a lot more awareness on this front and taking opinions is easy. But this is not the best part. The best part are not people, it's tech (again). Tech is helping decode tech and make decision-making process easy.
Websites such as dXOMark and Snapsort have provided such objective tools, which bring comparison of photographic equipment out of the realm of bloody battle-fields. It's so much easier to have factual objective data aided by computer algorithm to help decide what camera is better (or better suited for a specific type of use).
Snapsort.com is specifically a tool one simply can't do without. What is the need to ask what camera should I buy when you can just log on to snapsort.com and do all the analysis in plain English?
(4) Usage - This is the area sometime people (specially those new in the hobby) need help with. They don't understand their own requirement. They don't know what do they shoot. They don't know what are the primary features they need. They don't know what features they can do without. They don't know what route they will be taking tomorrow.
If a user understand his
usage pattern, decision making is fairly easy.
To conclude: How to choose a camera?
Step 1: Decide between (1) and (2). How would you rather buy? By budget, or by tech?
Step 2: List down your preferences. What do you shoot? What features do you need often, or use often? What features did you wish you had?
Step 3: Head to snapsort.com and pick some cameras randomly from their top page. Start comparing.
It won't be long before you arrive at your conclusion.
PS: If I were to start in the hobby today, I will buy the cheapest DSLR available. Out of the choices here, I suppose Nikon D3200 is the cheapest. I'll just pick it and start shooting.
PPS: Camera tech have progressed so much in the last decade that today's cheapest DSLR will beat the crap out of pro-flagship of 10 years ago. Weak link these days are the photographers, not the cameras.