A friend of mine asked for help in picking a DSLR. She has been using a Nikon N75 with 28-80 zoom to date. Prior to that she was using an old Canon FD mount body.
When she talked to me, she was just about ready to buy the D70 based on internet hype and the local store being a strong Nikon seller. We discussed what she wanted to do with the camera now and in the not too distant future. Her indication was that, besides family/kid memories, she had started into portraiture and wanted to continue that direction. So with that in mind, I discussed and worked with her on the angle of manually focusing and composing. She is a convert away from AF for this type of work now. So suddenly the quality of the viewfinder became very important. The ability to clearly compose and focus on the matte screen became among her most important features of the camera. I sent her around to look at the D70, RebelXT, Evolt and DS bodies with this in mind. She came back and reported the order of usability of the viewfinder for the stated purpose as Pentax *istDS Canon RebelXT Olympus Evolt Nikon D70 Yesterday I stopped at the local store and tried the D70 and *istDS side by side with 50mm lenses on each. The D70 was barely usable (I would hate it) and the *istDS was clearly better for this. So today she picked up her brand new *istDS. I was very pleased that someone would get past the hype and really pick something that would work best for what they wanted to do. -- Best regards, Bruce
