What is the difference between a Nikon D50 SLR digital camera or a regular digital camera?

Answer 1

Here's the advantages of the D50 (and digital SLR cameras in general):
* It's vastly more responsive than digital compact cameras. With compact cameras, the autofocus takes forever, you have annoying shutter lag, you even have lag due to the electronic viewfinder. With the D50 everything is much faster. With action shots (even with kids and pets) that means you get more keepers.
* Bigger viewfinder. I know it sounds trivial, but I like to see details when I look through a viewfinder - not just check the composition.
* Better low light performance. dSLR cameras keep working without the flash during dusk and indoors. You can crank the ISO up to 1600 and still get great image quality. If you add a dedecated low light lens, like the 50mm f/1.4, you can even do street photography at night. (I do with my Nikon D200.)
* More control over depth of field. With the D50, you can take a picture of someone and deliberately blow the background out of focus. With compact cameras pretty much everything is always in focus, wich makes pictures look flat.
* Extra features. The D50 lets you take more control than than the usual 'scene modes'. That's if you want to, of course. You can also just leave it on fully automatic.
* Incredible choice of lenses. With a compact camera, you have 5x or 10x zoom, and that's it. I used to have a camera with 10x zoom myself, but indoors I was constantly backing up into walls. With my dSLR, I can slap on a super wide angle lens and make my tiolet look like a ball room. Or I can use a macro lens or a 600mm tele lens, or a low light lens, or whatever lens the job requires.
The down sides are that the D50 costs more (you can get started for around $800, but extra lenses cost $150 and up... way up) and if you do collect a lot of gear, you'll end up dragging it all around in a heavy camera bag.

Answer 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_single-lens_reflex_camera

Don't be too quick to blow a wad of cash on a digital SLR camera. The advantage of an SLR camera is that it's a professional camera and can take professional quality pictures. The disadvantage, however, is it is a PROFESSIONAL camera.....which means it's not easy to use and it costs alot of money.

For half the cost of a decent dSLR rig, you can get a Sony DSC-R1 fixed lens camera. This camera takes professional quality photgraphs but is easy to use. For most consumers, this is a far better choice for a camera than a digital SLR.

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_r1-review/index.shtml

Answer 3

the SLR is way more versatile, you can change the lens and stuff, plus SLRs are usually the more "proffiional cameras" and Digital SLRs are usually alotmore expensive than normal cameras... if you have that Nikon u should be happy with it ;)

Answer 4

Price and versatility