Lasst week I met an old guy on my local patch. He was shooting some overwintering geese, using an old Nikkor 600/5.6 with a Nikon D2H with more than 300.000 clicks on the clock. Yeah right - manual focusing and all of 4.1 megapixels. He later mailed me a couple of the shots he took on that day, and they looked pretty good on the computer screen. Not the sort of quality you need for making large prints, but they looked pretty good nevertheless.
That really made me wonder, especially after the introduction of the D5 and the D500. Sure, modern cameras have (much) higher resolution and better autofocus, much better ISO performance and so on. And the shots that old guy took would have looked much better if he had used, say, a D4 or a D7200 or whatever. But do you really need a modern camera with all the bells and whistles if you don't intend to publish large prints of you photos? Sure, I want to get a D500 myself, once the prices have come down a bit and it's clear there aren't any bugs, but like I said, that old guy and his - by modern standards - ancient camera really made me think.
Over here a lot of young birdwatchers are getting into photography at the moment, and many of them can't afford to buy the latest and the greatest. So I meet quite a few people who get themselves bridge cameras or entry level DSLRs like the D3200/3300. I think they'd be better off buying a D300 or even a D200 which can be had for well under 300 euros now. Most of them have something like 15.000 to 30.000 clicks on the clock which isn't really all that much for these cameras, I think. And some older AF lenses can also be found cheaply, such as the first version of the AF 300/f4 with a converter. They'll definitely miss out on a few shots, mainly because of the slower autofocus, but I think you can get pretty good results even with these "old" cameras.
So, what do you think - how important is owning the latest gear? And what would recommend a newbie to get? A D3200 or a D3300 or rather an "old" D300 that can be had at less than the same price?
Hermann