It’s always hard to make a decision about purchasing a new camera or lens. There seems to be an endless amount of things to consider: everything from ISO performance of a camera to the sharpest aperture of a lens you’re thinking about buying.
Well, luckily there’s some great resources for helping you compare all those cameras and lenses:
The Digital Picture
The Digital Picture has some of the most detailed lens reviews you can find on the Internet. I’ve been using this website to help me buy lenses ever since I started photography.
Their written reviews are great, but they also have an incredible tool for comparing the quality of different lenses. You can easily view sample images shot at different apertures, so it’s a great tool for determining if a lens will meet your needs. For example, if you’re looking for a 400mm lens that’s sharp at f/5.6, you can use this tool to easily compare different combinations of lenses and/or teleconverters to see what your best option might be.
The only downside to this site is that they currently just review Canon and Nikon cameras and lenses.
http://www.the-digital-picture.com
Imaging Resource
This site has detailed reviews of many different cameras. Most of the camera reviews have a ton of sample images, all shot under different lighting conditions and ISOs. So, it’s a great resource for checking out the image quality of different cameras, and seeing how they perform at the higher ISOs or to see how well they handle shadows and highlights.
http://www.imaging-resource.com/camera-reviews
Digital Camera Database
This is a great site I just discovered that helps you compare two cameras. Specifically, it helps show you the differences in sensor size, pixel pitch, pixel area, and pixel density. I haven’t seen any other site that gives you this much detail about the actual size of the pixels on a camera’s sensor. This information is important because smaller pixels generally means the camera will produce noisier images (this is especially important if you plan to do any astrophotography).
What did I miss?
If you know of another great resource for comparing cameras or lenses, then please tell us about it by leaving a comment below. Thanks! 🙂
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About the Author: Steve Berardi is a naturalist, photographer, software engineer, and founder of PhotoNaturalist. You can usually find him hiking in the beautiful mountains and deserts of southern California.
Thanks for the links to these resources!
Hello Steve! First, I have to say your blog is one of the most delightful reading regarding photography, and, for me (as a apprentice of “photonaturalist”), a very important source of information. I must thank you for sharing all the knowledge you have.
Going to Digital Camera Database, I found the information there (though I only made one comparison) kind of weak. The results, when comparing two Nikons (D5100 and D7000) are almost the same, with no relevant difference stated. As I said there, maybe in selected models, when the comparison is so tight (personally I think this is not the case), they should add some features to clear the doubts.
Features like flash synchronization speed, ttl off-camera flash control (meaning its built-in flash can’t serve as a Commander in Nikon’s Wireless Lighting System) and artificial horizon in live view can be important stuff to help a more serious photographer decide for one or another model.
I don’t really know, maybe another models or brands have more accurate analysis; but I think the comparison in another sites like snapsort.com turns the choice easier.
Hi Steve! Thanks so much your weekly newsletters, I do appreciate them. Here is a website that I found helpful – reviews of all camera makes and models. This site was helped me select my second and more advanced DSLR. The reviews are quite detailed. Also Steve does the top 10 cameras of the year in December: http://www.steves-digicams.com/hardware_reviews.html
Hope this is helpful.
I use Digital Photography Review at http://www.dpreview.com.
A website that I found very helpful is dpreview: http://www.dpreview.com/
I have found their reviews very detailed and always check the comments before purchasing a new camera. I find they often include information that isn’t even mentioned in the camera manual.
This site is very good. http://www.dxomark.com/index.php
Hi Steve, my first weekly news letter,very helpful,delightful thanks for sharing.