I have been looking for my first DSLR for a while in order to replace my old Canon Powershot A510. I am stuck between two camera’s and could really do with some advice.

Nikon D40 (£314)

Initially I was very convinced about the Canon EOS 400D, but the price to quality ratio of the Nikon D40 has really taken my mind of the Canon. Although the Nikon only takes AF-S lenses (lenses with integrated focus motor) and “only” has 6 MegaPixels, the price difference of more than £100 makes it really worth the investment. Additionally I hear everyone saying two things:

1. Don’t focus on MegaPixels
2. Lenses are more important than the body

So with the £100 difference I decided that there would be money left to make a nice investment in a good lens. I haven’t decided which lens to buy yet. I have about £160 left for a nice lens and especially the Nikon VR lenses look very nice (and expensive). I am really looking for some sound advice so if you think I am making a mistake, or if you have a good idea what lens I might be looking for (see my flickr stream if you want to know what kind of photos I tend to make) please let me know.

Sony Alpha A100 (£434)

Now, strangely, during the writing of this post I started to re-evaluate the Sony Alpha A100. Sony’s first DSLR is practically a Minolta, offering a whole line of lenses. But what I like is that Sony tried to provide a slightly better system than others. First of all it has build-in image stabilization in the body, so in contrary to the Nikon it doesn’t need a special lens. So considering that the provided lens is a 18-70 mm F/3.5-5.6 (in contrast to a 18-55 mm F/3.5-5.6 in most other kits) this makes an actually good entry level model.

Unfortunately there are some downsides. The Sony is heavier (about 110 grams) and has a slower startup (just over a second). It does have 10MP versus 6MP on the Nikon but somehow I don’t care about that. At about £434 it does offer a good combination under my maximum budget. I don’t think Nikon can offer me a good combination of body plus lens that offers image stabilization for that price.

Summary

In the end I still haven’t decided on a camera. I was thinking of buying one before my Bachelor Degree ceremony at the end of this month, but maybe I better wait until I figured out exactly what camera to get. Recently Ronald also showed me the new Nikon D40x (basically the D40 with 10MP) which got me doubting for a while, but the price (£414 retail price) does not leave anything for a nice lens. Please if anyone wants to give me some advice, do it in a “limiting my options” way.

[Update]

I had a look at both the Sony and the Nikon this afternoon and decided that the Nikon is very nice. The Sony felt a bit too big so I ordered the Nikon D40 later this day. I had a nice deal for a Nikon D40 kit + bag + 4GB SD memory for £342/€500. Hope the delivery is a as fast as they said (2 or 3 days).

One good reason to have Twitter is to subscribe to Tom Morris’ special Twitter accounts that give scrape the London Tube status and post them on Twitter. When you activate mobile updates, you can have the latest Tube updates on you mobile phone. Cool how these kind of “mashups” (buzz-word alert) prove more useful than most attempts of the actual public transporters.

I wanted to send the harddisk that broke down a while back to the company where I bought it (HardwareTotaal.nl). So I emailed them and got a very “direct” response saying “not our responsibility, go annoy Samsung”. This is not what I was used to, as I am used to companies like Alternate that have a very nice RMA procedure.

Obviously I didn’t leave it at that, so I started sending a whole bunch of emails. Unfortunately this week their website showed me this message that explains why it will no longer be “their responsibility”:

(Short Translation: It is no longer possible to place orders. We decided to request bankruptcy.)

I saw so many people at BarCampLondon2 with their own Moo Cards that I decided to ditch my old business cards and get some myself. I really loved the idea of personalizing your cards, and not having 250 cards with the same design. So I ordered 100 (minimum) with some of the nicer images in my Flickr feed.

Now, I learned a wise lesson with my last business cards that made it very worthwhile to buy only 100 this time for the same price (19.99 euro) as the 250 I bought before. The whole idea of buying a lot of identical business cards is just ridiculous unless you are a sales person. For the rest of us fewer is better because we are (A) not popular enough that we would be going to run out of them soon and (B) if we will, we are probably popular enough that the important people manage to find you without.

Now if you think you would eventually definitely run out of the cards, it is still good to only buy a few. I, for example, ordered 250 a while back, on which most of the information is now outdated due to my move to the UK. Buying less cards makes it easy to update your information and maybe once in a while choose a fresh design.

I had some really serious trouble with my old server (which is still in the Netherlands managed by an ex-housemate) so Alper offered me some space on his DreamHost account. Tonight I managed to move the files but somehow I have some issues with the OpenID login for users. So for now no OpenID login, because I need my sleep.

Update: OpenID “should” work again.