Canon vs Nikon – which camera brand captures your heart?

Personally I think that there is no real difference in the handling qualities of Canon and Nikon digital single lens reflex cameras once you are used to their layout. What you will often find is that Nikons are usually better when you are using a very high ISO rating (say above 3200), so if you want to photograph a black cat in a coal cellar using available light a Nikon DSLR is a better bet.

My first DSLR was a Canon 20D because that was considered the best camera on the market that suited my price but if the Nikon 200 had been on the market at that time I might have chosen that instead. Canon produce a wider variety of lenses than Nikon and many of them are judged to be superior to Nikon so if you choose your lenses with care you can collect the best of the Mark and independent lenses. I think that you should also choose the body that is best suited to the type of pictures that you are taking. For instance I use my EOS 5D Mk2 for portraiture and either my EOS 7D or EOS 50D for taking pictures of flying aircraft.

With regard to Dot’s complaint about her Canon IXUS117 HS I would only like to say that I download all my pictures to my PC using a card reader instead of using a USB link and Canon software. I think that this is quicker and I have not had any problems with it.

It’s true that the lenses, or ‘the system” locks you in. A pro’ photographer friend of mine bought a new camera body every year and he regarded his lenses as his kit.

Canon has many more cameras in its range than Nikon, especially the compacts, I do wonder if this has skewed the results at all.

I have found that in the past Canon has chased the headline “pixel count” more than Nikon who’s philosophy was that it’s the quality of each pixel which is more important than the total count. Take the Nikon D700 for example, a full-frame sensor of just 12 megapixels. Each one gathering more light and producing a higher quality, lower noise, signal than a more densly populated sensor. This demonstrates the Nikon way of doing things.

Canon have begun to come around to this way of thinking too, look at the G11, fewer pixels than the G10. It now seems that we have “enough” pixels and technology has produced some remarkable processing engines, so we can choose a camera at our selected price point with the features we want and concentrate on the more important job of taking photographs and enjoying our hobby.

Did you guess I have a Nikon D700?