Which DLSR camera is the best for black and white photos?Especially between the NikonD80 and Canon450D?

Question

Also other models welcome but I think I'm getting one of the two listed.

Answer 1

Once again, Canon 450D and Nikon D80 are cameras that are hard to compare to one another. I have answered a question where I discussed this situation just yesterday. Please take a second to read my reply here:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Now black and white - while many cameras have black and white mode, if you want to achieve a really great black and white results, you should not shoot in that mode. Shoot color, and then use Photoshop or a similar application to convert your images to black and white.

You will get a much better result, because there are so many ways to convert, for example you can use different ammounts of red green and blue channels to achieve the more dramatic images. I like using channel mixer in Photoshop to convert to black and white for this purpose. Another advantage - if you like better the original color image - you can have it that way. Finally, when you convert to b+w you may chose to leave a little tint of color here and there. This is called selective coloring. It's a very often abused and cliched technique, but none the less it can be very effective and impressive if used properly and not abused too much.

So all in all - it does not really matter that much what camera you use as per black and white application. Just choose the one that's most appealing to you. Again, please take a look at my answer to the question above, so that I don't have to repeat all I said there over again.

LEM.

Answer 2

Don't treat these two cameras as if they are cheap point and shoot cameras which you can use in "black and white" mode.

Shoot it in RAW, (or if you would rather not, set it to JPG) then remove the color using  a program, like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/little_pook...

so it comes out like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/little_pook...

or this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/little_pook...