Sales of digital compact cameras are stagnating now that the market has been saturated and most casual snappers own a decent camera phone. So manufacturers are looking to more comprehensively featured SLR-style cameras – on which you can swap the lens to best suit your chosen subject and so achieve more professional results – to generate fresh consumer interest.

And it seems to be working. Thanks to prices falling while performance increases, and take-up moving beyond photography enthusiasts and early adopters, you can now be shooting like a pro with a digital SLR (DSLR) and standard lens set up – typically a versatile 18-55mm – for a street, or internet, price in the region of £400. As lenses are not always automatically supplied with a DSLR, and the lowest price you’ll see is usually ‘body only’, it’s worth a little research beforehand to earmark the set up that best suits your needs and budget.

With a DSLR you don’t get a memory card included in the box, but should aim for at least a 512MB capacity to make the most of the specification on offer. It’s also worth bearing in mind that you can’t shoot video clips on a DSLR like you can on a digital compact, but the leap ahead in image quality will more than make up for it.

Unlike all but the highest-end compacts, all DSLRs offer the ability to shoot in best-quality Raw file format – unlike common JPEGs, the camera does not apply its own processing to the file and so in effect provides a ‘digital negative’ – while some allow the capture of Raw and JPEG simultaneously for the utmost convenience.

Because Raw files are larger, more memory hungry, and require specialist conversion software, JPEGs are easier and faster to access – and you can also store more of them on a memory card. Ultimately, it’s a case of horses for courses and users should select either format mindful of the end use for their pictures, and the amount of post-processing they wish to undertake.

This won’t be a consideration for many, as DSLR resolution and image quality is improving all the time. Whereas a year ago, 6 megapixels was the standard resolution for a consumer-level DSLR, with the likes of Sony’s Alpha 100 appearing last summer the benchmark was increased to an almost future-proof 10 megapixels. This allows manufacturers to argue that digital results are now, finally, bettering film. And, of course, unlike film, you have the advantage of being able to immediately review the results on the LCD screen that adorns the camera back.

Buying Advice

For the sake of our comparative test shots, and to ensure the most level playing field possible, each of the DLRs were set to full auto and large, fine-quality JPEG settings. The results, taken utilising the photographer’s preferred conditions of natural filtered daylight, were reviewed in Photoshop CS2 on a G5 Mac with 20-inch display. We were looking as much to test the handling of the cameras in the more challenging scenario of low light without flash (their ability to avoid image noise and find critical focus) as daylight conditions.

Kicking off with the caveat that the images produced by any one of these cameras if viewed in isolation would seriously impress someone upgrading from a compact, the wheat has to be sorted from the chaff.

The surprise here is how well the Sony Alpha holds up against newer competitors from the big names. With some great high-street deals available, it suggests itself as a sound investment for those who don’t already own a set of Canon, Nikon or Pentax lenses for the old film SLRs. Put simply, the Alpha 100 has just about everything you’d want on a DSLR, while remaining simple enough for you to snatch the camera up for a quick snapshot if needed. That said, its images are not quite as sharp as those produced by the Olympus E-400 or as colour-rich as those from the Samsung GX-10, the latter being one of the best-value deals around. Panasonic’s DMC-L1 is capable of great quality if you work at it, but when its images are ranged alongside cameras at half the price, they’re no better.

If you’re on a tight budget, for £1,000 less than the DMC-L1 and with a lens bundled to boot, the D40 from Nikon is the best deal of the bunch. Its speed of response and user friendliness mean it’s a safe bet for those making an initial foray into more professional-looking pictures. It may be the only camera missing a dust-reduction system here, but in fairness its target market is unlikely to change lens very often and will value its other assets much higher.

If that really is an issue and 10 megapixels would come in handy, second place goes to the Samsung GX-10 for ease of use, if you don’t mind the resultant price hike, with the equally intuitive Canon 400D coming in third as a more portable alternative.