Nikon D90 v Panasonic FZ18

[David Bottel]

Hello,
I currently have a Panasonic FZ18 and I'm thinking of upgrading to a Nikon D90.
The FZ18 has a focal range of 28mm to 504 mm(35mm film camera equivalent) with a small sensor, whereas the Nikon has a focal range of 27mm to 158mm(35mm film camera equivalent) with a much larger sensor.
My question is if a photo was taken with the Nikon and then cropped to produce the same field of view of a photo taken with the FZ18 at maximum zoom of 504mm would the image quality be better on the Nikon, just the same or worse than the FZ18.

Regards, David

[Dave Humphries]

Hi David,

I think we need to know the MP of each to help work that out.
The D90 is 12.1MP, the FZ18 is 8MP I believe (both 'effective', not max figures).

To improve the chances of success, you could buy the D90 with the Nikon 18 - 200mm VR2 (28 - 300mm in 35mm/FF terms), instead of the kit lens.
That would almost certainly give a better result at a crop equivalent to 504mm and be less of a shock after the FZ18's range.

Without doing the maths, my gut instinct is the kit lens might give equivalent results, but I have no experience to base that on.

I moved from a very similar bridge camera (see my signature) to a D5000 and kept the same zoom range (28 - 300), so I only see benefit. I did use an older kit lens once, for a week or two, and I felt so constricted by the lack of reach for my staple diet of wildlife shots.

Hope that helps,

[David Bottel]

Hi Dave,
Many thanks for your reply.
By the way your photo's of insects etc are fabulous.

Kind Regards, David

[Dirk]

compact camera have a bigger DOF than DSLR , but they also suffer from a lot more pixels per inch on a smaller sensor , thus creating much more noise and one thing all compact suffer is that you can't change lenses to get a better quality, the quality if fine on the first eye but when looking at full resolution the dslr wins , also do not forget a dslr is faster than 99 % of the compacts, easy a compact like the FZ18 needs to pull out the lens (takes time) , lock it i a default setting (takes time too ) dfire up the engine (takes time too) in that time the dslr has taken a lot of shots while the compact was still busy

when it comes to quatlity i think de the 90 is a far better camera than the compact , because you can upgrade the dlsr by buying better glass aka lenses and buying fast or ultra fast or extreme fast memmory , while buyng a normal card or one model faster will be faster (the card) than the compact will ever be ready and capeable to write it

but again just my opinioun and i happen to have a lot of compacts also with large lenses so i know what i am talking about..

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Dave,
Many thanks for your reply.
By the way your photo's of insects etc are fabulous.

Kind Regards, David

Hi David,

No worries - and thanks for the compliment.

Cheers,