All is not perfect in digital SLR land.

• Lack of superwide lenses. Unless you own a full-frame dSLR, your digital’s focal length multiplication factor must be figured in to calculate the true coverage of the lens. It’s nice to have a 200mm lens magically transformed into a 300mm telephoto, but it’s not so great when you discover that your 20mm wide angle is now an ordinary 30mm lens that barely qualifies for the wide-angle designation. To get true wide-angle coverage, you’ll need a prime (non-zoom) or zoom lens that starts at 17-18mm. Superwide lenses are more expensive and harder to find. When I added a digital camera body to my film camera kit, my widest existing compatible lens was a favored 16mm semi-fish-eye lens that was the equivalent of a 24mm optic on my new digital SLR. Many digital camera owners have success using similar fish-eye lenses, and then “defishing” the finished pictures to correct for the distortion and produce a conventional wide-angle view. I ended up going a different route and buying a 12mm-24mm zoom (for $1,000-about the same as my dSLR body) to get an 18mm to 36mm (equivalent) viewpoint.
• No LCD preview or composing. Not a problem with through-the-lens viewing, you think? Your SLR view is totally black, yet some non-dSLR camera’s LCDs show a dim, serviceable image under such conditions. Some non-dSLRs with swiveling lenses automatically invert the image on the LCD so you can point the camera at yourself and still preview the image you’re about to take.
• Dirt and dust. Make no mistake, if you change lenses at all your digital SLR will eventually accumulate dust specks on the sensor that you’ll have to remove. Oddly, this drawback of the digital SLR is rarely discussed by vendors, yet it’s the most common problem a dSLR owner is likely to encounter. Your dSLR is going to be much larger and weigh more than whatever point-and-shoot digital camera you may be used to.
• Size, weight, and general clunkiness. Your dSLR is going to be much larger and weigh more than whatever point-and-shoot digital camera you may be used to.
• You can’t shoot movies with a dSLR.I actually took some nice sound movies of my son’s acting debut in West Side Story using a 5MP point-and-shoot digital that could make 640 × 480 videos at 30 frames per second. Because of the way dSLRs operate, movies are beyond their capabilities.