Railfan Technology > Nikon D3100

I have a little blow money and want to get back into photography. Would a D3100 with 18-55mm and 55-200 lenses still be worth $300? Or should I just keep using my iPhone 17 Pro Max?

Posted from iPhone

From my perspective the issue would be the 14.2 meg sensor, there should be similar deals available with better sensors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_D3100

There's a huge dump of this style of DSLR available right now so there's lot of choices out there. YT is full of tutorials of older but better sensors going for same or less money. They rattle off lots of specs so stick with the model numbers and dates. But they have good retail sources for cameras to follow up on.

There's questions about whether mirror-less cameras are really doing what the average Joe wants a camera to do. So the market is in a spin about the latest greatest versus a comfortable older camera.

There's lots of deals to be had so take your time. Amazon and EBay are full of older cameras but it's not easy to figure out if they have been taken care of with low number of exposures or somehow damaged, or maybe just needing a sensor clean.

There's also the rabbit hole of using older manual lenses with newer DSLR's, interesting idea but not the same as a basically good camera with basically good modern AF lenses. An interesting inventory of camera data is at Ken Rockwell dot com but he has too much info and it often conflicts with later info and opinions, kinda confusing but a source of info on older gear.

A little perspective on the sensor resolution...  National Geographic magazine has always been considered a technically high quality publication.  When digital cameras were new, they stated 6 megapixels as the minimum resolution they would accept.  The 3100 is well above that.

​I had an 18-55 on my first crop senson Nikon.  I found it to be a very useful focal range.

Instead of ebay or amazon, I'd buy from a company that specializes in used camera and related gear.  I've had good experience with KEH.  

they have been bundling those nikon with 2 lenses for years, not that bad new prices, and thousands are on the used markets, not that much

Agree the Nikon 18-55mm and 55-200 are ' kit ' or packeged lenses with the DSLR's when they came out. There's a huge number of them out there, nothing special and not of much value. Mine went kinda soft under certain conditions, the recommendation was to toss it out and buy another one.

At the time I purchased refurbished bodies for a lower price, turns out there was a big market in refurb'ing decent camera bodies and reselling with a limited warrenty. The large stores had a lot of volume going on from that, often they have their own amazon or EBay stores, didn't mean to imply buying from an individual on the Internet somewhere. Make sure the re-sell items have had some sort of decent care.

Seems to me the price is kinda high. Doing some quick searches should bring in a lower price and / or better camera features / sensor. But it's a great idea to get back into the hobby, the DSLR format is very familiar and should be easy to pick up. Lots of tutorials on YT.

In general the Nikon DSLR's step upward from 3000 to 5000 to 7000 series. The three digit class is much more sophisticated, not neccesaruily more useful for our hobby. Usually something like frames per second, or Video features, better battery life, faster write times, GPS or WiFi, etc.

But buy something and get outside.

I think the lens is more important than the sensor. I still have my old 6 mp D40 as a back up and it can produce nice images under normal conditions. On the other hand the consumer level lenses most of us poor folks can afford tend to all have soft spots that bite you in the arse when least expected.  I just processed some images taken with a Nikon 18-140 shooting at about 38mm f/10 at 1000 sec....you would think a sweet spot for that lens but the edge falloff was just terrible.  It was a broadside of a train, the middle was sharp, but the front and end of the train were fuzzy as heck.  You might want to read some lens reviews before deciding. And that iPhone camera is a pretty good fall back.

JBWX



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/26 00:07 by jbwest.

Shot with a Nikon D3000, now shoot with a D3200.  Both are perfect for starting out. 

Michael Fair
Royal Oak, MI