Need Compact Size DSLR

I am still waiting for someone (well, Canon or Nikon :D)) to come out with a super-compact interchangeable lens DSLR. Remember the Canon IX? Gosh, it must been hard to hold that guy, but I luv the small package. Small will convince me to take it out of the house more often. I believe the XTi is a tad smaller than the D40.

Nikon D40 is certainly an entry level of DSLR that's pretty good for some tight budget buyer like me. I have a deep thought of several DCs weeks ago. Like Canon G7, Pentax K100D and Nikon D40. But considering that, Nikon is a great brand and it is anyhow a DSLR (I know it is an entry level). It looks Professional when you grap it. Take a picture yourself in front of a mirror. That looks smart !

The so called "legit reseller" of bhphotovideo.com also sells gray market products that do NOT come with factory warranty, I would try to avoid them and buy from Amazon.com

Nikon D40 is certainly an entry level of DSLR that's pretty good for some tight budget buyer like me. I have a deep thought of several DCs weeks ago. Like Canon G7, Pentax K100D and Nikon D40. But considering that, Nikon is a great brand and it is anyhow a DSLR (I know it is an entry level). It looks Professional when you grap it. Take a picture yourself in front of a mirror. That looks smart !

The so called "legit reseller" of bhphotovideo.com also sells gray market products that do NOT come with factory warranty, I would try to avoid them and buy from Amazon.com

B&H specifically states if a product is a US model or an import. They do not sell grey market D40's. Not to worry.

Should we vote a KING of Entry Level of DSLRs?
Lets not, 'cuz there is no clear winner. Depends what one likes, feels etc.

I love Nikon lenses but rather have a Canon body, but that's just me.

U mean Tamaron. They are more consumer than anything else... they don't even have a "Pro" line like Tokina has, I think. Nothing wrong with Tamaron or any other third party, u just gotta do-diligence research b4r purchasing.

Tamron are ok, though they're not as good as Sigma if you're after a third-party manufacturer. That said, Tamron's 90mm Macro lens is generally considered to match or beat the quality of any 90/100/105mm Macro lens on the market, be it Sigma, Canon, Nikon, whoever.
And I wouldn't touch Tokina myself, not even their 'pro' line.

If you're looking for top-end lenses, stick to the manufacturer's own - Canon especially, their L series lenses are pretty-much unrivalled when it comes to SLRs.
About the only professional quality third-party lenses are the three or four fixed-focal-length lenses that Zeiss have produced to fit the Nikon system.

My only complaint with it is that its build quality is somewhat poor; I sometimes think it feels like a toy.
Feeling like a toy in this case has its advantages: Small & Light, which is kinda issue if u don't confine yourself to studio photography.

When I bought my first film SLR, people were complaining too it had a "plastic" collar instead of a metal one... 15 yrs later, still works like a champ... good enuff for yr amateur photographer.

if you want a more informed opinion of the D40...

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond40/page25.asp

as well as the Canon 400D/Rebel XTi...

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos400d/page29.asp

also the Pentax K100D is another good option...

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentaxk100d/page24.asp

dpreview is generally considered the most reliable review site on the web, they're a good guide to use but there's nothing that will compare to actually getting a feel for the cameras yourself.

Don't bother with the Pentax though - the range of lenses available isn't half as big, nor would you be able to get any high-end lenses if you got into your photography seriously.
Canon and Nikon are really the only two worth considering IMO.

Reviews abound, I think it would be truly useful if they have like, 12 Month Review, what people REALLY think after having used them for a while. Like long term car tests.Amateur Photographer do stuff like that occasionally.
Problem is, it hasn't been a year since the D40 and 400D were released.

I haven't really had a chance to give this thread my full attention yet but I'll try and cover some of the basics.

Canon and Nikon are generally considered to be the top two camera manufacturers when you get to high-end kit (staying within the SLR arena, it all gets too complicated once we move into range-finders, medium format gear etc). They are the only two manufacturers that produce gear suitable for professional users, be it bodies or lenses. No-one else comes up to par with them.
In the case of both these manufacturers, they both produce their own lenses and eevery major third-party lens manufacturer builds lenses to fit their mounts too.

In the case of Pentax, they've produced a number of D-SLRs but never anything that could really compete with Nikon or Canon. Again, they produce their own lenses but nothing like the number that Canon and Nikon do and, as with the other two, pretty much every third-arty lens manufacturer builds stuff for their system too.
Also, a year to a year-and-a-half ago, Samsung started producing D-SLR bodies that used the Pentax fitting. Basically, they were just re-badged old Pentax models and last I checked they were considered a joke.

Minolta went under, unfortunately. Well, they didn't go bankrupt but they decided that the photography wing of the company wasn't profitable enough and, so, sold it off to Sony who now produce lenses and bodies to the old Minolta standard. Sony aren't a tried-and-tested camera manufacturer which isn't a bad thing when it comes to the electronics side (obviously they know how to do all that) but normally it's bad news when it comes to lenses. However, through a combination of the years of knowledge that the ex-Minolta engineers brought with them and the manufacturing side of things for Sony's compact cameras having been heavily overseen by Zeiss in the past, Sony are very mush the exception and their cameras aren't too bad from what I've seen - nowhere near as bad as Samsung anyway.
On top of that, Sigma, Tamron, Tokina etc all produce lens that fir the Sony/Minolta system.

Olympus are an interesting company. When they produced their first D-SLR, they'd never before produced a camera system with detachable lenses that used auto-focus. When producing film SLRs, unlike everyone else they'd stuck to manual focus only with the much loved OM series.
So, this meant they had a bit of a mountain to climb, having to design an entire body and lens system from the ground up. They did this and the results are pretty good but the way they did it was markedly different to everyone else. All the other D-SLR manufacturers took their pre-existing film systems and put a sensor in, this means that all the lenses are geared up to 35mm film, so to get an equivalent viewing angle, you need a different focal length - 28mm is considered 'wide-angle' for a film SLR but to get the equivalent on a D-SLR you need around a 17 or 18mm focal length, this is due to the sensors in most D-SLRs being smaller than a frame of film (they're actually described as APS-C sized, so the same size as the film in an APS camera that produced a 6x4" picture, which goes back to what I said about APS being lower in quality than standard film). However, with the Olympus cameras, they used a different-sized sensor so you need to half all your focal lengths - so to get the same field-of-view as 28mm on 35mm film, or 17/18mm on other D-SLR systems, you need 14mm on the Olympus E-series. It's nothing to really worry about because all the lenses are tailor made for the system, so you can get wider lenses easily, though only from Olympus - whilst Sigma I know do produce lenses for the Olympus system, it's a significantly smaller selection than they do for other manufacturers. I'm not even sure if Tamron or Tokina bother with Olympus lenses.
In the past couple of year, Panasonic have decided that they're going to back Olympus, producing camera bodies that are compatible with the Olympus system. As with the Samsungs, they're really just re-hashed Olympus models but, unlike Samsung, they don't suck. Rather more significantly, with Panasonic came Leica (who produce the lenses for the Panasonic compact cameras) - Leica are the name when it comes to lens manufacturing but, rather like Olympus, have never really moved beyond manual-focus film cameras (in fact, they're still producing range-finders, not even having moved on to SLRs).

Last, and very much least, Sigma produce their own D-SLR, for whom they are the only lens manufacturer.
The camera itself, in many ways, far out-strips the lenses available for it but it's an oddity, using a multi-layered sensor which only produces RAW files, so whilst it's in many ways technically superior to most of the competition, you'd be hard-pushed to find one in a bricks and mortar store and the argument for buying one is not all that compelling.

When you come to third-party lens manufacturers, Sigma are the biggest - they produce a bigger range than anyone else and their EX series is about as close as you'll ever get to a professional lens outside of the Canon and Nikon ranges.
Tamron and Tokina are ok, they each have a few lenses they've used to build their reputation but when it comes to the majority of the stuff, it designed to be cheap, same as most of Sigma's.

In general, you use a third-party manufacturer to either get a similar spec lens to what the proper manufacturers sell but at a cheaper price, or they also produce a selection of unusual lenses - focal ranges the manufacturers have forgotten/neglected to produce themselves.

Anyway, yeah, long story short, go for Canon or Nikon.

Any questions, just ask.

Step666, I respectfully disagree that Canon or Nikon are the only choices. I love Nikons to death and always recommend them, but Pentax is by no means a limited system. The amount of legacy lenses that a Pentax DSLR can support is almost as much as for Nikon.

Truckson, the D40 is sure to be a nice camera (I had a D50 and the results from that were beautiful). If you can afford to wait then go for the rumoured 10Mpx version.

EDIT: Oops, I didn't read yinyang's thread properly! No longer a mere rumour!

I never said that the Canon and Nikon are the only choices, I merely recommend them over the competitors.
Okay, fair enough.
And, I am right in saying that no-one else currently produces lenses on a par with the Canon L-series apart from Nikon.
No. :D Actually Pentax somtimes makes better or at least always just as good lenses as the bigger two companies. Not to mention Zeiss, Leica, Minolta (RIP), Olympus, Tokina, Sigma, Angenieux, Cooke, Taylor-Hobson and so forth. :)

No, I'm sorry, I disagree. I have not seen lenses from Pentax to match the Canon L-series or the top-of-the-range Nikon lenses.
Maybe you and I have looked at and seen different things.
I don't know, I might be wrong, they might exist but I've never seen them advertised, reviewed or even mentioned in passing.
Ask pros who use Pentax - they know how good the lenses are.
also, I would hasten to add that there is a gulf between what the likes of Zeiss and Leica are capable of producing and what the likes of Sigma or Tokina can do.
I mean, Leica have produced lenses faster than f1!
Sure, but quality-wise there are some surprises out there. And quality can be expressed in different ways - which is whay many photographers prefer old lenses; or why some use Leica SLR lenses on Canon bodies; and so on.

Leica's rangefinder lenses are more or less the best you can get, but not always by that much. And if you didn't already know it, Zeiss made the f/0.7 lens that Kubrick used to film scenes in Barry Lyndon. :cool: