Harvey Loc: Pioneer, CA

A used Canon or Nikon kit from B&H or Amdoroma with a guarantee and return policy is a good way to go also.

Shutterbugsailer Loc: Staten Island NY (AKA Cincinnati by the Sea)

Coming from the perspective of a lifelong recreational sailer and digital photography enthusiast, going directly from a point and shoot to a semi pro full frame DSLR is like going from sailing a Sunfish on a lake to an ocean racer or America's Cup catamaran with no steps in between. A case in point is my brother in law. He came into some money and went with his wife on an Alaska cruise. He bought a Canon EOS MK2 and a bunch of L glass to go with it. His sole photographic experience prior to the trip was with point and shoots, including a Panasonic FZ35 Bridge camera, which he bought along as a backup. I thought the pictures he got with the Pany were better than the pro model which with he spent most of his time either fumbling with menus or putting it in full auto. For this reason, the entry DSLRs are probably a better choice. They have enough features to get the job done, without having a menu selection bigger than a diner's IMHO, the best move is to avoid the newest releases and get an older model. As a whole, the budged DSLRs have the highest incidence of design/manufacturing defects. They have most of the complicated design of pro models while being made to meet a price point and are introduced yearly, often without time to weed out defects. By buying last year's "Dinosaur", you can get a model with the bugs worked out, and at a considerable savings over the "latest and greatest"

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

The way I understood it was that Gates bought DOS from someone for a very cheap price because the nerd guy wanted to buy some hardware to hobby around with and didn't have the money so he sold DOS to Gates for something absurd like $12,000, not that Gates obtained rights to offer "his" OS.

I also understood that Gates purposely worded the contract with IBM to allow him to also market DOS under a different name than PC-DOS, which became MS-DOS, and IBM's lawyers should have caught that and refused it but because of being in a hurry for the deadline they dropped the ball.

Gates also didn't write the original Windows, it was purchased.

Nor did MS write Access, it is an MS GUI laid over FoxPro, a DOS database from Fox Software in Perrysburg OH that Microsoft paid many millions to buy. That was a risky investment but he wiped out Peachtree and Lotus eventually so it was a good investment. One owner who had previously left the Fox company then sued the owner who penned the MS deal and the two sued each other out of all the money Gates paid and it was all wasted on legal fees.

If I remember right MS Word was also originally WordStar or something like that.

Gates essentially did and does excel in marketing more than innovation. Buy a product cheap and sell it a bazillion times while adding minor improvements in each ensuing version so that everyone buys multiple versions of every title for years and years. That's genius.

When he buys a product somebody else created and they have worked the bugs out of it beforehand, that product is as solid as a rock. When it is a MS invention, such as all the different versions of Windows since the first one, the product always has bugs, problems, security flaws, stupid features, and is typically ill-conceived - coming from an out-of-touch engineers viewpoint instead of asking the public what they want in the product and doing strong Beta testing before release.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

I have an 8MP Panasonic FZ-30 as well and I've printed 13X19 with it successfully. But... the words "came out great" are relative and the opinion of what's "great" is going to be different from one viewer to another.

The only way to determine "great" for sure would be to shoot the same exact subject at the same exact time with your FZ and a new dSLR, like a Nikon D3200 for example, and enlarge them both to 16X20 on the same printer. Then you would likely see that the bridge camera's output becomes "acceptable" instead of "great" and the dSLR output is better so it is "great" instead.

Theoretically, a file used to print a 16X20 should be 4800X6000 pixels when using a 300ppi standard which allows maximum quality printing on a commercial quality machine. That is 28.8MP so your and my Lumix FZs are both woefully inadequate.

Even only working with 240ppi which is more of a "home" quality printer file, a 16X20 should be 3840X4800 pixels which is 18.4MP total. The Nikon D3200 has that ability and most 16MP dSLRs are pretty close too but our FZ's aren't truly adequate for "great" 16X20 prints, nor the 13X19s I have printed in the past.

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

All excellent points there Marco, and I agree with all of them. My Nikon bridge takes 4000x3000 pixel pictures and when I print a 16 by 20, I generally put a frame around the picture in whatever color/background I want and large enough to extend past the mat. So technically, the actual photo from the camera is less than 16x20, but the printed photo is 16x20. I do the same with the Panasonic. In other words, with a 16x20 frame, and a 2" mat, the picture is really more like 12x16. I didn't think about that when I made the post, but I do think of it when I prepare a photo for printing. Also, many pictures turn out really good (great imo) at less than 300dpi, which I'm pretty sure is why you said theoretically up there. Anyway, you can get some very nice 16x20 pictures out of a bridge camera, even the older ones, and even at less than 300dpi.

Btw, I also now have a D5200 that takes 6000x4000 but haven't managed to get any pictures I would bother printing out of it. To be fair though, I have very few pictures I bother to print and fewer I would print that large. I'm not a very good photographer, just a snapshooter really. I do have a ton of pictures that look "great" on a 50" led HD TV, even at high compression and low resolution. That I find truly amazing.

PS, you are also right on the money with the Gates stuff..

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

I added the part about 240ppi (not dpi) because commercial printers request 300ppi files but home printers are not printing at as high of a resolution as commercial printers do. I suppose you could actually print a 180-200ppi file on a home printer quite nicely too but would be stretching the envelope a bit on a 13X19 or larger.

Because ppi and dpi are not directly related and printers will throw away ppi data they don't need to print at whatever dpi they are designed to print at, I use the word "theoretically" in this subject because CaptainC will come charging in exclaiming dpi and ppi aren't related at all and he's right. Using a 300ppi standard for files meant for printing just allows whatever print machine is being used to have abundant data to throw away when it prints and still have as much as it requires to print at whatever dpi it has nozzles to print at.

An exceptional alternative is to use Perfect Resize, which used to be Genuine Fractals, to create emulated pixels that fill the cracks between real pixels quite believably through some form of interpolation (similar to a TV that can display 120 lines of data crossing the screen through a process of "up-verting" although the input to it is only providing 60 lines). The software is inexpensive (less than $70 the last time I looked) and you could enlarge a 6MP file to print at 4 feet by 6 feet or any huge size you want with virtually zero loss of quality.

Olan Mills Studios (recently purchased by LifeTouch) uses Genuine Fractals at their processing facilities from what I've heard. The studio and traveling photogs were using 5 and 6MP Olympus digital cameras from way back with premium lenses because they just didn't break down, selling enlargements of all sizes that were sometimes 3 feet by 4 feet and larger. The results I've seen were absolutely awesome with no degradation of any kind.