Because technology changes so rapidly, it’s unlikely that the camera you buy today will be your last. On the other hand, even the least expensive dSLR is a major investment for most of us, particularly when you factor in the cost of the lenses and accessories you’ll purchase. You want to make the right choice the first time.

Indeed, for as long as I’ve been involved with photography, deciding which SLR family to marry into has been an agonizing decision. No one wants to be locked into a product line that won’t do the job, won’t keep pace with technology, or, worse, will go belly-up, leaving owners of a particular vendor’s equipment orphaned, in a sense. A generation ago, film SLR buyers were committing to cameras produced by companies called Topcon, Miranda, or Yashica. These were fine cameras in their time, but none of them survived to the digital age.

Even among modern digital camera vendors, you have important SLR manufacturers that were late to the party (Konica Minolta, for example) and others with now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t products, such as the Contax N Digital, a 6MP digital SLR announced in July, 2000, but later withdrawn from the US market. You can be certain that Konica Minolta is in the digital SLR fray for the long term, but can you be that confident about all the other players in the game?

Digital SLR decision makers often fall into one of four categories:

■ Serious photographers, photo enthusiasts, and professionals who already own lenses and accessories belonging to a particular system, and who need to preserve their investments by choosing, if possible, a dSLR that is compatible with as much of their existing equipment as possible. Professionals who buy equipment like carpenters buy routers. They want something that will do the job and is rugged enough to work reliably despite heavy use and mistreatment. They don’t necessarily care about cost if the gear will do what’s needed, because their organizations or clients are ultimately footing the bill. Compatibility may be a good idea if an organization’s shooters share a pool of specialized equipment, but a pro choosing to
switch to a whole new system probably won’t care much if the old stuff has to fall by the wayside.
■ Amateurs and enthusiast photographers with too much money who feel that the only way they will be able to take decent (or better) pictures is to own the very latest consumerlevel equipment. These are the people who bought the Canon Digital Rebel when it first came out, but sold everything and switched to the Nikon D70 a few months later to gain some additional capabilities. Six months later they were posting questions in newsgroups about whether they should sell everything again and buy a Canon EOS 20D or maybe a Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D.
■ Those who are buying their first dSLR, and either don’t own an existing film SLR, or don’t particularly care about using their old equipment with a new camera. Often, these buyers don’t plan on junking everything and buying into a new system anytime soon, so they are likely to examine all the options and choose the best dSLR system based on as many factors as possible. Indeed, their caution may be why they’ve waited this long to purchase a digital SLR in the first place.

Once you decide which category you fall into, you need to make a list of your requirements. What kind of pictures will you be taking? How often will you be able to upgrade? What capabilities do you need? Ask yourself the following questions to help pin down your real needs.