dslr.ws

The Online Photographer has a list of the top 10 camera recommendations for fall 2007. Six of the ten are DSLRs, along with one digital point-and-shoot, two 35mm film cameras, and the Phase One P45+ medium format digital back.

The DSLRs that made the top ten are — in order listed on the site, though it’s not clear if that’s an actual ranked order or not — the Pentax K10D (“pretty much the camera with the mostest at the moment for the serious amateur and artist”), the Nikon D80 (“the D80 really feels right — a sort of baby-bear camera”), the Canon 5D (“the 5D provides exactly what many art and landscape photographers most need”), the Olympus E-510 (“the most feature-laden of the amateur DSLRs”), the Fuji S5 (“high dynamic range and very accurate color, and this makes it the #1 choice for the most numerous type of professionals and semi professionals, namely, wedding and portrait photographers”), and the Canon 1D Mark III (“simply a technological wonderment and a superb piece of engineering and design”).

The article also mentions a few other cameras in passing (e.g., the Nikon D3 as upcoming competition for the 1DMkIII), and is a good read overall (as The Online Photographer always is). You should click that link up top and read it all for yourself.

There’s a brief but interesting comparison of the 1600 ISO performance between the Canon 400D and the Nikon D80 over at KammaGamma.

They conclude that

Nikon D80’s noise reduction system is more advanced than the one implemented in the EOS 400D. The Nikon D80 removes color noise almost absolutely and leaves very little edge problems. On the other hand, the Canon EOS 400D leaves more color noise bit delivers more details. We would choose less details and less color noise than the opposite under high ISO, but that is a matter of personal taste.

Canon is definitely stretching the DIGIC II’s limits with the 10MP resolution. We hope to see cleaner and better results in Canon’s future cameras. In the mean while we are happier with Nikon D80’s results in high ISO.

I’m not sure I agree with their conclusions, though, I personally prefer the lighter noise reduction and greater detail of the Digital Rebel XTi images, at least based on the samples they show. There is more noise in the Canon results, but the Nikon ones just look over-smoothed and don’t have nearly as much detail.

Be sure to check out the images yourself to see what you think. Feel free to leave your own thoughts below in the comments (comments are closed on KammaGamma’s original post for some reason.)