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Please help; camera recommendations


I am attending a university to get a degree in Visual Art-Digital Art. I need a good digital camera to use in my photography classes and to create images when learning Photoshop, etc.

What are the minimum specifications that I need?

Name brand considerations?

How much should I expect to pay for one good enough for university work? How much should I expect to pay for something I can use well past graduation professionally?

Is there a used camera market? If so, what are the considerations?

I would really apprieciate any input from photographers, especially art photographers.

Art is Life.

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I recomment you get a Used Pentax K-01. This camera uses both new and older lenses from the 60s. It doesnot have a falling mirror so your photos will be sharper than many Nikons and Canons. Used lenses can be had for $30 used apiece. You could have 10 different lenses for cheap. A DSLR doesnt have a "falling" mirror; the mirror *flips* and the motion that could inflict vibration is the *upward* moving one. Which usually doesnt happen, my images do not lack in sharpness despite a mirror, thank you very much.

Also if you really care so much about vibration from the mirror you can always use lifeview or mirror lockup mode.

I wont argue at all against the old Takumar lenses from Asahi Optics (aka Pentax) from the 1960s, though. Back then Asahi Optics tried to compete with Zeiss and did some of the best lenses mankind has ever seen. However sadly I cannot mount M42 lenses on my Nikon DSLR.

The K-01 is only an APS-C camera which leads to problems with getting wider angles.


You do not need more than 16mb. In fact, 8mb will be enough. I will assume you wanted to write Mpx (Megapixel), not MB (Megabyte). A pixel is usually quite a lot larger than just a byte.

The required resolution depends upon how large one wants to print. If you want a meter long installation with tons of detail, you will have to do a panorama shot, because no current digital camera has the hundreds of megapixels required for such a large print (with film a 8x10 large format camera might manage that trick).

I would qualify the minimum needed resolution as 6 Megapixels; 12 or even 24 Megapixels wont hurt either, though.

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