Top Digital SLR Camera Products Below $1000

SLRs are the cameras that are used for truly professional photography. SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex. These are the most sophisticated, and most expensive of the cameras. With the advent of digital photography, digital SLRs also came into picture. And their rates varied from a few hundred dollars to, hold your breath, a few thousand dollars. And most of the times these rates are only for the camera body and you have to buy lens separately.

So, what does an amateur photographer do who had been using traditional cameras and wants to migrate to a digital SLR camera? Don't worry, there are some decent Digital SLRs available for less than $1000, and this includes the cost of lens too. These are truly for beginner to intermediate level photographers, and provide a nice stepping stone before moving to top-end SLRs.

There are many companies that are giving Digital SLRs below $1000, but there are just 3 that are of decent quality.
1. Olympus EVOLT E-500
2. Nikon D50
3. Canon Digital Rebel XT Digital Camera

Olympus EVOLT E-500
This is the cheapest of the above 3 SLRs. It comes with 8 MP resolution (the Nikon D50 comes with 6.1 MP resolution). It is very ergonomically designed Digital SLR and comes with an Olympus 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens. It comes with Olympus's dust reduction system that removes dust off the CCD whenever the camera is turned on. It is compatible with Olympus's Zuiko Digital lenses, and some third party lenses too. It is very compact (5 inches wide) and lightweight ( less than 16 ounces). It has an array of features that make it a really wonderful choice. It offers a lot of color related features , both automatic as well as manual. You can adjust white balance, color temperature, and many other color modes such as Vivid, Natural and monochrome as well. It offers an ISO range from 100 to 1600, five metering modes, manual focus bracketing, a three point autofocus system, sharpness adjustment and a whole lot of other features. Its playback mode gives you a lot of data to adjust images, even color histograms are provided. It has a large LCD screen that can be viewed easily from different angles.

Its only bad parts are the optical viewfinder that is a bit small, large startup time( due to dust reduction system), and sometimes problematic automatic white balance. Overall, this gives a whole lot of features for the money.

Nikon D50
This is the cheapest Digital SLR from Nikon's stable. It gives a decent 6.1 MP resolution that lets you crop images or blow them to poster size. It gives the versatility of digital camera with outstanding picture quality. It gives the duality of full manual controls as well as automatic controls. It is compatible with AF and DX Nikkor lenses; kit includes 18-55mm f3.5-5.6G ED AF-S DX Zoom Nikkor lens. It gives continuous shooting at 2.5 frames per second for bursts of up to 137 pictures. It has a 2.0-inch LCD display. It offers 7 scene modes, including Child mode. Nikon's scene-optimized Digital Vari-Program modes simplifies picture taking, freeing the photographer to concentrate on capturing the evanescence of special moments. Shutter speed choices extend from 30 seconds to an action-stopping 1/4,000 second. It has improved image-processing algorithms that give these Nikon SLR better noise characteristics at ISO settings up to 1600. Only bad aspects about this camera are that it has a lesser resolution, and controls are not very well placed.

Canon Digital Rebel XT Digital Camera
If you want to buy an entry level Digital SLR camera, don't look beyond Canon Digital Rebel XT Digital Camera. This is best of the 3, and my personal favorite. It has 8 MP resolution, and it comes with a EF-S 18-55mm lens. Its image quality leads its class. In fact, this camera is just priced at par with other beginner level Digital SLR cameras, but in terms of features and image quality it competes with intermediate level Digital SLR cameras. It comes with Canon's Digic II processing engine. It is amazingly small and lightweight. It offers flexible metering mode, flash-exposure control and autofocus selection by various focus modes. It offers various shooting modes and scene selection options. It offers ISO up to 1600. It was a very fast start-up time, and 3fps continuous shooting mode speed. Only bad aspects are that the body is plastic, and it has a smaller 1.8 LCD. Other than that, this is the way to go if you want to start with professionally photography. And you won't have to burn a hole in your pocket for that.