I am a Nikon guy. Been using all the upper end Nikons since Vietnam starting with the F series and moving up through the D series at the beginning of the new century.

So when I took a fun trip to the islands last year I chose the Canon SX-30is over the Nikon Coolpix 500, because the 500's were sold out everywhere. (Ended up paying About 425.00 with a good class 10 chip) It had an optical 24 to 840mm fixed lens!! I found it to be a great camera for the use intended. With the super zoom you could really reach out and touch someone. In addition it shoots pretty good video. I actually did some HD video for a commercial job with it.

This year a friend of mine was going on a road trip and wanted a camera to take with him. I let him take the SX30is. 4 days later he emailed me some of his photos. His image quality was pretty good, but since he has never really taken many photos, his composition was pretty bad. He liked the camera so much he sent me a 400 dollar check for it.

Now, I am without an inexpensive pretty darn good camera. So I again purchased a simular camera. I was thinking of the new Nikon Coolpix 510. It had a 24 to 1000mm optical zoom lens. but Nikon decided to up the megapixel race which resulted in poorer performance on available low light. This along with along with the lack of not having a hot shoe for an external flash, and poor battery life led me back to replacing the Canon SX30is with another one. I opted for the new Canon SX40 HS. It has some big improvements over the SX 30. Canon reduced the megapixels from 14 to 12, thus improving low light performance and less noise in higher sensitivity settings.

The Canon cameras discussed above really can't compare to the Nikon D3. But again the cost of a Canon power shot SX40HS with the super optical zoom lens with a digital 2x zoom feature which puts the camera capability of 48 to 1680mm at 6 megapixels, only will set ypu back about 400 plus dollars, compared to the Nikon D-3 at $20,000 bucks with FX lenses to compare to the one Big super zoom lens on the SX40. Here is the real kicker. The SX40HS would weigh 30 pounds less than a Pro D3 with case and lenses, and immage quality being quite acceptable.