NIKON N65 QD 35mm SLR Camera Kit with 28-80mm Nikon Zoom Lens

Rest of you, please read on.

Do not be fooled or made feel like a cheapskate by those chilling words: "amateur", "entry level", "budget priced". With Nikon N65 (marketed as F65 outside the U.S.), you are not spending a lot of money, but you are not getting an inferior, cheap, bargain-basement product, either! Make no mistake - this is one solid product, an example of very advanced precision engineering DELIVERING stunning results.

Why is N65 is REALLY all you need. Because if you were to go for pricier models, then for a lot of extra money you will be getting a heavier, more heave-duty camera and some extra features which you are unlikely to use anyway. For some of us, it's worth the extra money, but the rest of you will buy little more than more prestigious badge.

I will not go into detail as to what this camera can do: there is a good description by Amazon, and anyway, it is so loaded with features that for me personally there was nothing left to be desired.

I have tested this Nikon in Africa for three months (including tropical rainforest in Ghana!), with plenty of dust and humidity around. It performed like a dream. It also worked beautifully in January, on a particularly cold winter day (-28 Centigrade) in Lithuania, which, being in northern Europe, can be biting in winter, thank you very much.

My friends who spent similar amounts of money on cameras in the same class (Canon, Pentax and Minolta) admitted that mine delivers appreciably higher quality, especially on close-range shots and in high-contrast situations.

The main competitor in this class is Canon EOS Rebel 2000 (again, marketed differently outside the U.S., where it would be EOS 300). They are very similar in functions but Canon is slightly cheaper (and hence more popular, one would think); the only trouble with Canon is its appearance - jazzy shapes and rather sad looking black plastic makes it look a bit like a large compact camera with a large lense... My opinion, anyway. And for bigger hands, Nikon N65 just feels chunkier, more secure and more satisfying (in fact, Nikon specially made N75, which is really a later version of N65, which is slimmer and more suited to feminine hands). Again, "feeling" is a matter of opinion. And while we on about N75, it's been "sexed up", seemingly to catch up with Canon's soapy shape. Big mistake, the way I see it.

Many people ask me - don't you want to go digital? I have to explain to them that digital is not for everyone: if you are happy that most of your photographs would be shared by e-mail, then of course, digital is fine. You will save film money, developing costs, and with digital, you do not have to wait for films to be processed.

HOWEVER, if you are after high-quality printed pictures, which can be enlarged to be put in album or hung on the wall, you would have to spend SERIOUS money on digital to achieve results even approaching what a relatively inexpensive film camera can do. We're talking thousands and thousands of dollars - to match the quality provided by this Nikon for 300 bucks.

With traditional photography, you do not have to forgo the convenience of electronic storage and sharing online: scanning from film is cheap, for a few bucks you can have the whole roll on a CD, with much, much higher file quality than ANYTHING that you can produce with an average digital camera.

Back to Nikon N65 - if there is a five-star product, this is it. Do not think about it as an interim entry-level solution: you are likely to be with this camera for years, and it will give you enormous amounts of satisfaction and pleasure. Go for it.