Just a little confession I truly am a Nikon lurker but with good reason. I’d so love to own the Nikon D3X right now But alas!

Canon & Nikon are both top-notch camera makers — but they both have slight advantages over each other in different areas of their game. If you’re new to the field of photography and have to choose one over the other its relatively easy to weigh your options. But it sure as hell gets complicated and very expensive if you’ve gear vested in one particular brand, sadly Canon over the years and looking to go the other way: Nikon that is. More so if it is a hobby. Winning the lottery would help but I never seem to be in luck.

Its been over ten years I’ve been shooting with Canon and with more concentrated effort in the last probably four odd years. From my limited experience, travels on the Internet… Canon seems to make great camera bodies and lenses and seemingly dominates the Landscape world. Nikon on the other hand dominates Sports, Journalism, Portraiture, Low-light all around. Not everything is rosy for Nikon either, one has to lug extra weight and the menu system is hideous is some ways. Resetting a Nikon setup or changing quickly between one type of shooting to another type is not as easy as it is on Canon. But when you see how Nikon gets its colours spot-on without any extra tinge of blue(outdoors) yellow(night-time) and red(on skin tones) then the extra weight and hideous menu system seems like a small price to pay isn’t it? Nikon also has excellent AF points while Canon only gets good AF measurement on the middle spot mostly(sorry Canon). Nikon offers very good low-light captures, far lesser noise both at low-light and high ISO and higher burst. Canon of course fights back with higher resolution(file-size) but unless you’re going to print every image and crop every image heavily higher file-size is good but not an imperative. What is important however is to fix Canon’s back-focusing on its lenses and noise! Canon’s low noise reduction in the current model I have(Canon EOS 5D Mark II) is over-hyped. If you are a Canon shooter check your shadow noise at any ISO with an equivalent Nikon shot.

I spend countless hours viewing photos, reading EXIF, reading techniques, trying and experimenting as much as I can. It’s a lot of fun and I have learnt heaps just by analysing photos and trying to read the EXIF data where available. This is my experience, I don’t dislike Canon it’s just that if you truly compare ‘apples’ to ‘apples’ right out of the box — what you get out of a Nikon DSLR box is marginally superior. Some of the small imperfections that come about with Canon can be fixed and some quite easily are – but remember, the user has to know there is an imperfection to start with, have the knowledge to fix it, the tools(mostly software) and the time to do it.

When you sitting there in a dimly lit restaurant and trying to catch a moment and your canon hunts for focus till the moment has passed of course and then it somehow gives you an image with much noise and grain in the shadow region – trust me it’s neither art, nor refinement from earlier models. It’s a sign that Canon couldn’t care less. They are busy creating photochains and social buzz.

Having written my personal experience its only a matter of time before some die-hard Canon lover finds me walking down the road and punches me in the face. Well, if there is little or no update on the site, you know why!