Specs seem awfully close...what's the point?

-- Bart (gba-opus@home.com), September 29, 2000

Answers

Chuck's comment starts out looking like you thought Bart, but re-read it. The nice bits were removed from the N65, not the N80.

-- Brad Hutcheson (bhutcheson@iname.com), September 30, 2000.

N65 seems to basically be a N80 with the such niceties as a real glass prism, separate aperture dial, AF selector(?), and faster shutter removed. They seem to be making a standard consumer chassis with standard AF, flash, and film wind, and adding or subtracting other features to fit different price levels.

-- Chuck Fan (chaohui@msn.com), September 29, 2000.

So the 65 is superior to the 80? Bizarre!

-- Bart (gba-opus@home.com), September 30, 2000.

Pentax has done that for the last few years with the ZX-5n, ZX-5, ZX-10, ZX-50, and ZX-M. All are built on the same chassis, but have more or fewer features depending on the price

-- Mark Erickson (mark@westerickson.net), October 02, 2000.

As has Minolta, with their ()Tsi series.

-- chuck fan (chaohui@msn.com), October 03, 2000.

These days, you can't ever possess the "latest / greatest" camera... at least not for long. If you read and believe all of the advertiser's brochures, you will be endlessly frustrated, or in a perpetual state of desire.

Get a camera... learn it, use it and enjoy it. If it worked for you yesterday, why is it suddenly obsolete because one with a slightly higher number, or alpha character suffix comes out? It isn't!

Photography is about making pictures... not buying new cameras. No feature on any camera is so magical that it can't be replicated by a real photographer... asserting his brain into the process. A shooter that really knows photography, can use a 20 year old Pentax K1000, and get results that exceed the "super consumer" with his newest "wonderplastic". He'll have a few more Dollars in his pocket for film too.

Don't believe the hype. Save your money, take your camera out and make it work...for you.

-- Al Smith (smith58@msn.com), October 03, 2000.