5 Great Entry Level dSLR Cameras That Won't Break The Bank

Digital photography is everywhere these days, and the major camera manufacturers have flooded the market with a wide variety of dSLRs that range from the cheap-o entry model, to the Canon 1Ds Mark III, the reference standard for digital cameras; and with a price tag of £6500 plus it had better be! When you are looking to take the plunge from a digital point-n-shoot to a dSLR, you obviously want a camera with a strong feature set and outstanding image quality. While price can easily spiral out of control, you can find a more than respectable entry-level camera in the £300 to £650 price range - including a kit lens! All of the cameras reviewed below have the standard features - Exposure Control (Bulb, Manual, Shutter-priority, Aperture-priority, Auto, Depth of Field), Shooting Modes (Close-up, Landscape, Sports, Portrait and Night), Metering Modes (Spot, Partial, Evaluative, Center-weighted), shoot in RAW, RAW+JPEG and JPEG, White Balance Control and Exposure Compensation. Most come with an 18-55mm, f/3.5-5.6 kit lens as standard. Sony Alpha DSLR-A330 Sony has a camera that you'll really enjoy as you step into the SLR world; the Alpha DSLR-A330. This camera has a 10.2 megapixel image sensor, a wide ISO range (100-3200) and a fast 9-point auto-focus system that will help you get super-sharp photos under the most challenging conditions. What puts this camera high on the totem pole is that it's equipped with Live View, a feature in which its 2.7-inch LCD screen acts as the viewfinder, which is a blessing because the regular viewfinder is a little too small and cramped for truly effective framing. Some people might dismiss this feature, but people have come to expect to use the viewfinder for framing in the digital camera age, so without it you might feel like you're taking a step backward.