Acquired new in Best Buy, Montreal
The value of this camera is amazing and personally, I find it a much better camera than all models with this newer approach of making the entry level SLR merge more and more with compacts. First, D50 doesn’t feel like it’s made to be held between the thumb and the index of a women like the Xt/Xti/Xsi/D40/D40x/D60. You can have a solid grip on it. Again, the extra megapixel of all the other camera don’t help at all. I tried the Xt for a week before moving back to the lower resolution D50. Of course, the Nikkor 18–55 is also a better lens than the Canon 18–55 of the time. 6 megapixels are adequate for all the optical information that’s possible to be squeezed into the APS-C sensor. The images out of the D50 are sharp but not harsh. The colours are proper and more fluid. If you’re on a budget, get this camera new on eBay and get a proper lens instead of buying a kit D80 with a 18–135.
For being an older camera, it means you’re not getting any of the new niftyness like sensor cleaning and live view etc. But then again, you’re buying a camera, not a gadget. Although I’ve been spending a bunch of money on new equipment, I believe that I still can’t say that my skills have grown past the capabilities of an entry-level D50. It’s too easy to get into a trend of thinking that better equipment yield better pictures. And the D50 is a perfect camera for getting started on practicing your picture taking skills, not money spending skills. Once we get past the point of understanding what produces a good picture, the camera equipment is then just a set of limitations that the owner has to discover and most importantly accept them and also realize that there’s an infinity of potentially shockingly amazing pictures that can be taken within those limitations. If the lens is soft on the corners at f/3.5 then stop trying to take sharp pictures at f/3.5 or give a bit more effort into the picture by coming to the location at a better time or bring a tripod.
