Since Dru is considering a D50, here is what I wrote a long time ago about the D50.
I read that the D50 is supposed to be more colorful than the the D70. At the time I thought this could be because the default color space is sRGB-IIIa in the D50 and sRGB-III in the D70. This can be set in the custom menu. I set mine to AdobeRGB with the caveat that I have to use sRGB when uploading to the web. In any case, I was wrong. It turned out that Nikon has improved the anti-aliasing filter in front of the CCD. This makes the camera less noisy: according to Popular Photography, the D50 is less noisy than the D70s and the Digital Rebel! One penalty of the new filter is that you can’t do infrared photography with the D50, but since I don’t do IR photography, that’s a non-issue.
Nikon removes the “sub command dial” from the D50? Is that a deal killer? They still have a command dial and an alt key to turn it into a sub command dial—very Canon-like, in my opinion. Maybe if you do bracketing exposures, eyeball depth-of-field, or use gradient ND filters, the D50 seems like too big a compromise. But it takes the same shots as a D70 or a D100 (actually, it performs a little better) and costs less. I can’t say which is best for you.
What would I miss if I had purchased a D50 today instead of a D70 then
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