Best camera for beginners?

lindsaywood1991

What camera should I buy? Any tips and suggestions?

bruto

Hard to say without knowing more about your needs and without a certain amount of brand bias as well, but the entry level Nikon DSLR's such as the D3300 and D3400 are pretty good bargains. I have used a D3200 for some time, and found it worked very well and made good pictures, with a pretty good combination of features and automation.

I have currently set aside the D3200 for a D7100, mostly owing to the availability of the latter, and the greater feature set of the much more expensive D7100, but the entry level Nikons "punch above their weight" when it comes to image quality. The higher you go in models, the more features and the better some things are, but the basic image quality changes little.

The D3400 is going for quite a bargain price these days, but I'd be inclined to look slightly backward and look at the D3300, which has a couple of features that the later model dropped. The D5x00 family has a few more features, improved auto focus, and an articulating rear screen which is a great benefit for some video and macro applications.

Almost anything you get these days will be at least very good, so my other main advice would be that whatever you get, spend plenty of time experimenting, taking bad pictures at different settings to learn how it operates. Read the instructions, ask questions, and take lots of pictures which can be erased. If you know your way around the menus and buttons, know not only what they do, but where they are, and you'll be way ahead. I've met people who buy a new camera just before a big trip, and are so unfamiliar with the controls that they cannot really use its capability. You don't need to know everything, and the automation these days is impressive, but the more familiar you are with the machine, the better you can make it do what you want rather than what it wants.

In the case of lower priced Nikons, make sure that you obtain the PDF file of the complete instruction book, as the printed one is incomplete. But don't hesitate to ask questions. The instructions can be daunting at times, and sometimes just plain obscure. It all makes sense eventually, and once you learn your way around, you'll gain real power to do things the way you want.