Actually, with regards to the "being stuck because of the lenses". I found that after buying a DSLR (Konica Minolta Dynax 7D coming from the analog Dynax 7) most of my lenses just proved either too crappy or too long to use (due to the 1.5 crop factor) anyway. So I ended up buying new lenses too.
Sometimes I still wish I had just switched to Nikon or Canon back then, but I think Sony taking over from Konica Minolta should be a good thing. Sony really is the top player in the digital camera market. I doubt there is any manufacturer that doesn't use Sony sensors in (some of) their cameras. Even Canon uses Sony for several cameras.
I wonder if that 18-70 lens does the camera justice. With DSLR it only makes sense to invest in good lenses. I guess the difference is not that huge, but check the
Sony Alpha DSLR-A100 vs. Sony DSC-R1 comparison. The DSC-R1 basically is a DSLR with a cheap (reasonably priced) fixed lens and the A100 is tested with a prime lens.
With a good lens even at the pixel level the image appears detailed where with a bad lens it starts to blur. For a holiday snap printed at 5"x7" it doesn't matter, but then for a holiday snapshot you don't need to use a DSLR either.
I mostly use a 85mm f/1.4 G lens and a 24-105 f3.5-4-5 lens. The difference between these is quite visible (both in picture quality and price though with the 85mm costing almost 3 times as much). I end up sharpening all pictures I take with the 24-105 to compensate for the loss in sharpness with that lens and usually also have to fix the loss in contrast. Unfortunately the 85mm is too long to be really useful for portrait photography anymore (with the 1.5 crop factor). It really is an amazing lens though.
Personally I'm thinking about buying a shorter prime lens (35 or 50mm) or the new Zeiss 16-80 zoom lens that should finally be available. Doing mostly portraits, I love the large aperture and sharpness of the primes, but changing lenses a lot can be really cumbersome and it often results in dust inside the body.
If you pick out a lens, do test the lens in the shop and make sure you read up on it. I once bought a Sigma 18-50 on-line and it just did not work properly (random focus problems). Apparently many people suffered the same problem. Luckily I could return the lens.
The IS function really makes a difference in several situations. In low light when you don't want to use flash it means you have several stops more freedom. Especially with a kit lens you tend to get too much lens blur if you use an f/stop number much smaller than something like F8. Opening it wider will make the pictures blurry more and more. This means you might run out of light quite quickly indoors.
My main love for IS is action photography though. When you want the subject sharp and the background blurred (panning). My first attempt with IS was at
the Monza 2005 F1 event. Guess it's not a great shot, but it shows the car moving quite fast with the details on the car still visible (although this picture is scaled down for web use) The IS suppresses the vertical shake and it makes sure the blur is only horizontal.
BTW if you can, you really should try using RAW. It just gives you much more room during postprocessing. The RAW files capture the full 12 bit detail of the sensor where the JPEG files only keeps 8 bits per color. It's like throwing away a third of the info that comes from your sensor. It's much better to correct white balance and slight over- or under exposures with RAW files. It's a lot more work though. You basically throw overboard all the in camera processing and you need to do that afterwards again. I actually use a RAW+JPEG setting to get both (although I don't think I ever used the JPEG files again).
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Topic: Bought a DSLR (Read 3416 times)
