^ i agree with everything he said.
if you are good with post processing, you might be able to get away with lesser gear. a nice lens can go a long way tho. i would suggest getting the latest and greatest by default and compromising from there. not everyone will use all the features a camera has. figure what you need from the camera the most and start eliminating what you dont need.
i used to do professional work (get paid for photography) with an entry level camera. a consumer wont be able to tell the difference most the time.
as far as the nikon vs canon stuff goes, its all preference. the camera bodies are laid out a little differently. nikon is more manual with knobs and dials while canon is more menu UI based. just a personal preference. im pretty familiar with canon, so i stuck with it. as far as lenses go, the general consensus that i get from other photographers is that canon makes really great prime lenses and good zoom lenses. nikon makes really great zoom lenses and good primes. it just depends how you want to use your equipment.
from personal experience, i think entry level canon is better than entry level nikon. higher end bodies, nikon sort of beats out canon a bit because of a few features but theyre both pretty comparable.
yea, megapixel count is a little over rated. the good thing about higher megapixels is that you can compress it more to give you clearer pictures, but thats about it. unless you plan on printing larger poster sized images, theres no reason for anything more than 10mp. also consider that the more megapixels you use, the bigger the file sizes are. an 8mp camera will take pictures that are about 4-6mb large. imaging trying to store all that. (i have 3 hard drives storing all my photos)
one thing i noticed about nikon is that they sort of over saturate images (colors are brighter by default). its not a good or bad thing. but it sort of fools noobs into thinking that nikon takes ābetterā pictures. it doesnt matter if you shoot in RAW format.
i wonder if REI is still around. he knows way more than i do about this stuff. he would probably have some better advice about this.
