In your opinion and from your experienc? I’m looking to come into the digital age and replace the ol’ film camera and don’t want to go into a purchase blind sighted. Can anyone reccommend a great professional grade camera?
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Canon EOS D40 is a nice start for digital. It is not a truly Pro camera but has the features that you will need to get great photos. The price is not bad compared to the Pro cameras
Basically all of the cameras that have been quoted to you in the answers are way to expensive for someone under normal conditions. I doubt that you have the capacity to purchase a $3000 – $40000 camera, so I would look at what fits your pocketbook and meets your present day expectations. Although all of the mentioned cameras are good, they are no better than their competitors and all will be outdated within 6 months to a year with prices dropping like a hammer.
There are four current “Professional” camera’s available.
In order of cost:
Nikon D3, $5,000
Canon 1Ds Mark III, $8,000
Mamiya 645ZD with Digital Back AFD II, $10,000
Hasselblad H3DII, $44,000
There you have it … we can assume you have been shooting professionally using some kind of film camera, so all you really have to do is choose the body that matches all those lenses you have and start saving your pennies to buy the matching body
Obviously you are going to get allot of different answers here.
My advice to you, is find all the options you want, and find the ones within your budget.
Their are websites that will help you decide based on ratings, options reliability, features, and so on.
Try these websites.
consumers report.com
cnet.com
Good Luck in your choice.
You asked for the best. Assuming you’re not interested in medium or large format digitals there are two choices:
Nikon D3 or Canon 1Ds Mark III.
Of course, you can spend a lot less and still get a great camera. But you asked for the best.
Now that you have been knocked over with the prices, perhaps you’d like to “add details” to this question or ask a new question telling us how much you’d like to spend.
Hasselblad H3DII is proberly the one you want. Its digital and full frame medium format.
The best would have to be the Hasselblad H3D
I love my Sigma SD14. It is not a camera for everybody and it has no “extra” features like video for example. But it produces stunning images with its Foveon sensor.
It has several quirks and shortcomings like extremely slow buffer to card transfer, ISO400 and over basically useless, low light performance in general, slow FPS, anemic LCD screen and occasional lock ups (disable auto preview to prevent this).
Even still I am deeply in love with the stunning images it can churn out, but you need to know how to nail the exposure. Use ISO100. Don’t shoot fast subjects in low light without a flash (buy one, the integrated is as bad as the one provided by every other manufacturer)