I get a constant stream of "I have an X body and I'm thinking about updating to a Y body, what do you think" questions. Here's my answer.
First, a few quick things to weed out the want from the need:
- The Progress Bar. If you've got a body that's more than two generations old, things have changed enough that perhaps it's worth considering updating. But if you have a D40x, D60, D80, D90, D200, D300, or D5000, I have strong doubts that you'd see much image quality difference by moving up. If you have a D700, D3, or D3x, you're nuts if you think you need a newer body.
- The Pursuit of Pixels. See my previous comments on this site: 12mp is probably more than good enough for most people. A few complain "but I tend to crop a lot." Not a valid excuse, as this is usually a lens or photographer problem, not a camera issue: keep reading.
- The FX Lust. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most people lusting after FX are using excuses to justify wanting it, not showing real need. Can you really say that you're hitting diffraction, ISO, isolation, or viewfinder brightness limits with DX? Right, most of you can't. Most of you would be better served by the D300's cover-the-frame AF, frankly. DX has advantages, too--cost being a huge one--so don't overlook them.
Most of the folk that ask the "should I upgrade" question fail one of the three tests, above. You have to be careful. There's a real difference between wanting the latest equipment and wanting to create better images. If you just want the latest gear, you fall into the Photographer Wannabe category. If you want to improve your images, congratulations, you probably are a Real Photographer.
So let's take a case in point. You own a D200 and an 18-200mm lens and you've got US$2000 to spend on your hobby this year. There are four broad categories you can spend that money on, so let's examine them:
- Upgrade the body. For US$2000 you can certainly afford a D300 (or a D300s Real Soon Now) and have a few dollars left. Sounds good. But what did you gain photographically? Well, you gained 2mp, which is not enough to make a real visual difference on most prints you'd do on a desktop inkjet. You gained perhaps a stop higher usable high ISO value--though I immediately wonder if you know how to optimize the photography you're currently doing at high ISO. Anything else in image quality? There's a small dynamic range difference, but not enough for most people to worry about. So we're left evaluating the camera features. Yes, the D300 has better AF, plus adds Live View and AF Fine Tune. Will any of those really elevate your photographic quality? And are any of these improvements worth US$2000?
- Upgrade the lens. US$2000 buys a lot of lens. That 18-200mm user would get a modest-but-real boost in image quality and a significant increase in reach by buying the 16-85mm and 70-300mm VR combo, for instance. This gets us into the question of the convenience photographer versus the quality photographer. My thesis is a convenience photographer isn't really much interested in image quality, thus I'm not sure why they're spending US$2000 at all! The quality photographer has a lot of options with this much money when considering lenses. A 35mm f1.8G and 105mm Micro-Nikkor fit this budget, too, and both are lenses that are better in optical quality than my presumed current lens at their focal lengths and do things that the kit lens couldn't. Almost any way I slice things, I can see meaningful potential image upgrades through lenses in this scenario. Even more so if we...
- Upgrade the photographer. US$2000 can buy a lot of training. That's perhaps two or three local workshops, or one exotic location workshop, or virtually everything that Scott Kelby's Photoshop User group produces (books, CDs, training videos, plus a local seminar or two). The problem here is in evaluating in advance whether the training will be useful for you or not. There are thousands of photo workshops each year, but they seem to be of quite variable quality. Before spending lots of money on a workshop, you need to try to find out about the style and commitment to teaching from the instructor. There's a big difference in workshops where the instructor is actually teaching most of the time versus ones where they're photographing most of the time. Unfortunately, there's no good source for evaluating this ahead of time. So all you can do is query the instructor before signing up and see what kind of responses you get to your questions. Still, good instruction will take you further in image quality faster than camera upgrades or lens upgrades. Thus, it's worth spending time trying to figure out how to evaluate instructors. One good indicator is repeat students. So try to find others who've taken workshops from someone you're considering and see if they'd take another. And one question to ask a former student: did their capture discipline improve?
- Upgrade your support. This one gets overlooked all the time because it's both a hassle to carry more equipment, using tripods slows you down, and good support equipment is expensive. Still, to get tack sharp images, you need to take out camera movement. VR isn't always the answer, and indeed, I find that most people's over reliance on VR tends to make them sloppy in terms of capture discipline (see #3).
So, here's my formula: upgrade the photographer first. Once you're comfortable that you really know what you're doing and that you're optimizing what you can get out of your current equipment, then upgrade your lens and/or support system. When you find you're using a body three generations behind the current state-of-the-art, then you can consider upgrading the camera. If you've really optimized the other things (lenses, photographer, support), you can consider updating when your camera is two generations old. But don't update every body generation: you're wasting money you could spend usefully elsewhere.
That's my answer to the most common email I get, as concisely as I can put it.