Thanks to @AndrewWu for the help a few months ago, this is to get a bit more of a public recommendation thing
I have recently been looking at cameras to buy for plane spotting can you help me?
Requirements (if the camera being recommended doesn’t meet these, please mention it)
. Preferably under $2K AUD total
. Lens- Anywhere from 200-400mm (preferably with a somewhat big range)
. Not full professional- I’m only a beginner/ amateur and not well experienced with messing with all of the settings
. A somewhat fast autofocus- (right now i’ve been missing shots due to this)
. An upgrade (Right now I have a Nikon D60/ 18-55mm and 55-200mm) it’s also from 2008 lol.
One of my friends offered to sell his “Canon EOS 3000D” for $200 aud (with a 18-55mm lens), would this be the way to go or something else?
Please keep in mind, I am getting a part-time job (hopefully) next month and don’t want to be spending something like 10K on a camera.
I would recommend a Nikon D7200 (out of transparency I used to own one and loved it) which is a somewhat intermediate level camera. It is not difficult to learn the basic features and it offers you the opportunity to slowly learn the more complex features it has to offer. The autofocus is great, the image quality is still competitive with newer crop sensors and you can find them used for very reasonable prices.
Pairing it with a sigma/tamron 100-400 will give you, in my opinion, one of the best price to performance setups you can get. These lenses are very similar but do have somewhat important differences, so you should look more into them by yourself and decide which one suits you the best.
Based on MPB used prices you’d be at around 1900 Australian dollars. Not including extra accessories you might want to buy.
Just as a side note, I have never owned a sigma/tamron 100-400, but I have read plenty of reviews and have talked to people owning those lenses and they seem to have very little downsides for their price. I own a Nikon AF-S 80-400 which is very similar in performance to these lenses.
Not sure how much $200 AUD is to American units but I always recommend the Canon 7D or the Canon 90D for a beginner. I started with a canon 18-55mm and a canon 55-250mm lens but would def recommend a 70-200 or a 100-400.
This is like technically a steal but I don’t think it’s enough of an upgrade to be honest. You’d probably be hunting for another upgrade within a few months. I got a friend who used that camera’s mechanical “twin” and it was not a pleasant experience.
Personally I use a canon 7d mark II and it’s awesome at least compared to my previous camera. Has 20.1 megapixels which in today’s standards might be a little low but the autofocus is very good at least compared to other cameras I’ve used. Not the most beginner friendly cam though imo
Both the sigma and the Tamron 100-400 are good options, I used the sigma for a bit and had no issues and had good image quality.I know Andrew can say the same about the Tamron and he used it much longer then I used my sigma. I can also say with my 150-600 that I haven’t had any issues with Tamron image quality (different lens but you get the point)
