I have hobby of photography. I want to buy a Digital SLR camera and lense set. I want to use this for my personal photography as well as professional (participate in competitions and Exhibitions, sell if possible). Which model should I by. Please advise, experts.

i have always been a fan of nikon d70 ... i have used it although i dont own one ....
but recently i used sony alpha ... i thought it was much better than nikon d70, heard its competitive with nikon d80 .... im no expert (not even a beginner in digital photography) but if i was to buy one i would go for sony alpha, just cause it was great when i used it :)

Depends on your budget.....there is a wide variety of cameras and lenses you can buy.....First of all...do some research on which brand you want to go with....mostly it comes down to Canon or Nikon. cause once you start buying equipments for a certain brand ...you'll have to stick with it for a long time.

I am a canon person, so I can give you information on Canons ....

the basic for a semi professional is Canon Digital Rebel XT or XTi, which is the cheapest amongst the canon camera bodies; around $400. But a good semi-professional one would be a 20D or a 30D which is around $1200 for the body.

If you want to go professional, the very basic/cheapest would be a 5D which would cost about $15-1600 for the body.

A more expensive and professional camera would be Mark II which costs around $6-7K

For lenses....there are a million choices....okay maybe not million but definitely thousands.

Let me know more about the type of pictures you will be taking and we can talk about the different lenses.

Would you need a digital SLR to take pictures of landscapes and people in general?

Wouldn't your run-of-the-mill point-and-shoot cameras like Casio Exisilim or Canon Elph with decent resolution (5MP or more) do?

I am no professional, heck, I am not even an amateur enthusiast. I just want to take pictures of my gau-ghar, print and post them on my wall. Not a large poster size, just 8" x 11" size. Would the difference between Digital SLR and Point-and-Shoot be markedly different?

I am also in the market for one :) I was recently looking at the Nikon D40. It has decent mega pixels- 6.1 - and doesn't blow a hole in your wallet - roughly around 600 bucks. My colleague bought one a few weeks ago and the pictures are great.

If you haven't already done so, check out this and other Nikons on Cnet: - http://reviews.cnet.com/4566-6501_7-0.html?filter=1000036_5250474_1104641_5105434_&tag=dffl3_1

Good luck - let us know what you end up buying :)

If photography is your hobby, go for DSLR. I am a Nikon person, I would recomend D40 or D50 if you do not want to spend more into it, my best would be D80. I own D70, I like it and wanna go for D200.

I will suggest to start with N70s and 18-70mm lense, still under 1k US $.

I always consider the advise of this guy http://kenrockwell.com/. Bought a tons of lenses (6 of them) based on his various performance tests in real world settings.

I'm a Nikon person. Be it a compact point-and-shoot or a SLR. Nikon is the best. I own a D50 and dream of D200. Personally I guess D50 or D40 is an entry level in Digital SLR.

When I bought DSLR. I bought only the body because the lens that comes in the kit are always crappy and almost useless in low light and high action shots.

Get Photoshop CS2 (buy it or crack it) and download a tons of "Action Set plugins" which make the job of image editing a piece of cake (and takes a lot less time). Take a look at my example at http://www.flickr.com/photos/clairvoyant/325676389/

Use this DNG (Digital Negative Converter) http://www.dxo.com/ if you intend to shoot mostly in camera RAW format (I shoot only in RAW format). It is far better (and far more advanced) than Photoshop's camera RAW plugin.

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A masterpiece from Canon, Canon EOS 400D / Digital Rebel XTi ( Self cleaning chip)..
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khaobaadi, Have you ever used Capture NX? If you did which one do you think is better NX or DXO? Do you have cracker or something?

DirectX
I have not used Nikon's CaptureNX so far so I cant comment on it...however I suspect there must be a great deal of similarities with Nikon's Capture 4 NEF (Nikon's RAW format) converter and I have to tell I'm not impressed with Capture 4.

I use DxO and it's a lot better in almost every sense compared to Adobe's DNG or Nikon's Capture 4.

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Just think canon..................

.............Anything else is Junk.

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- http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/XTI/XTIA.HTM

Nikon is much more focused in making extremely high grade optical instuments for various industrial use....probably Canon might be using Nikon glasses for making Canon lenses.

aabha, what's your budget?

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No! it is opposite..
Nikon is using or even buying Canon patents...

Actually I am not a Canon dealer.
I have used both SLR for long time.
So I will stay with canon...

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Canon is cheaper.
Canon 400D you can get it for 700US $.

For making pictures in constant and stable lighting situation (in studio for example) people might wanna consider Canon DSLRs for everything else outside the studio where the lighting situation constantly changes ( which is always the case ) Nikon DSLRs are far more smarter to make the necessary adjustments far more accurately and a lot quickly.
so the the suggestion here is..

Canon for studio
Nikon for everything else (including the studio)