What's the best sports digital for under $2500?

[Jeff_Gabbard]

A friend of mine is a newspaper publisher and wants to get a digital for shooting sports. A 1D or D1 is not in their budget. Is there anything out there with no shutter lag that would do for newspaper reproduction? I am not familiar with the myriad of digitals out there since I shoot with a 1D. Can anyone help?

[Mike_Cary]

Jeff is the $2500 budget just for the body or does it include lens and memory cards ? if it's just for the body your friend can easly pickup a Nikon D1 or Kodak DCS 520 for under that amount on ebay. Might even beable to get a Kodak DCS620, but those don't seem to be as abundent as the D1s and DCS 520s.

[ November 03, 2002: Message edited by: mikemtb40 ]

[otto]

Get an Olympus E10, they should be cheap by now. They have excellent, fast optics which is what you need for sports. For newspapers, you don¥t really need anything but HQ jpg¥s which it will shoot at a reasonable speed.

[albert]

Get an used D1, DCS 520 etc. If you insist on buying brand new camera there ain't many choices but Nikon D100.

Albert [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[marcus_wilson]

If you haven't bought one yet, check out the Kodak store on Ebay.com. They have several 720x pro digital cameras for sale. Some are new, others factory refurbished. I thought about buying one for a long time, but I have all canon equipment. (I did bookmark the site-you never know!)

Marcus [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img]

[Mike_Flaherty]

If there is a concern about budget, a digital SLR is likely out of the question. So, if you can live with 5X7 and smaller prints (without much cropping) and want a high frame-per-second rate (actually, the highest), a nice long zoom, external flash capability, and a sweet fast lens....consider the Olympus E100RS. They're out of production, but you can probably find one on eBay used for a good price. It was actually designed specifically for sports-shooters with low-resolution requirements.