If you’re a professional or a serious amateur you'll want the features a “professional” camera can give you. Most consumer cameras make you go through a series of menus on the review screen to do things like switching to manual focus, manual aperture or shutter speed control. Professional cameras have most of these controls on the outside of the camera so that once your fingers get used to where things are you can change the camera’s setup very quickly, usually without even having to look at the camera. Professional cameras also give you much higher ISO settings and store pictures more quickly. These cameras also let you use color profiles that are better than the standard "sRGB" profile used in most consumer cameras. Finally, professional cameras let you shoot in "raw" format, a format that records all the information the camera captures. The advantage in shooting "raw" is that you can adjust things like white balance and exposure later on in Photoshop. Top of the line digital SLRs will let you shoot at a color depth of 42 bits, 14 bits per red, green, and blue color channel. With a color depth of 42 bits you end up with a theoretical total of over 4 trillion colors. Your eye can't distinguish 4 trillion colors, and you don't actually see more colors at a color depth of 42 bits, but the extra data lets you make much wider color and exposure adjustments without introducing noise or losing visible image quality

One problem with a digital camera is the amount of time it takes to store a picture file on its flash memory card. Most professional cameras have a large “buffer,” a quickly accessible temporary memory store that goes away when you shut off the camera. When you shoot a picture the camera instantly stores the image in its buffer and then starts the much slower process of transferring the picture from the buffer to the memory card. With a professional camera you may be able to shoot a lot of pictures in rapid succession (burst mode) before you have to stop and wait for some of them to be cleared out of the buffer.

Most professional cameras are single lens reflexes (SLRs). An SLR lets you look through the lens at the picture you’re going to take. That can be a big advantage. If you’re using a viewfinder camera you have to live with a problem called “parallax.” When you get close to your subject, parallax keeps the viewfinder from seeing the same thing the lens is seeing. After you shoot, you find that the subject is way off to the side or the bottom in the picture, even though she was right in the center of the viewfinder. An SLR never has a parallax problem. But an SLR is large, fairly heavy, and obtrusive, and if it's a real SLR like the Nikon D300, when you shoot, the mirror slaps up and down making a very noticeable noise. If you’re doing street photography that’s a drawback. For street photography you want a camera that’s small, quiet, and black.

Professional cameras currently on the market have sensor arrays that are several times the size of the sensor arrays on "consumer" cameras. If two sensor arrays have the same number of pixels and one is several times the size of the other, the large sensor array is going to have much larger individual sensors (photosites). The larger the photosites the less noise. My Nikon D3 has a twelve  megapixel CMOS array that's 2.3 times the size of my Nikon D2X's twelve megapixel CMOS array. That's the main reason why the D3 shows less noise at 3200 ISO than the D2X shows at 800 ISO.

Finally, professional cameras let you use interchangeable lenses. That may or may not be a good thing. If you’re a professional or a serious amateur it can be a good thing. But if you’ve never hooked up a fixed focal-length Nikon lens to a digital Nikon body with a standard DX sensor you may be surprised when you first do it. With a 35mm film camera or a full-frame digital camera, a 35mm lens is a wide angle lens. That same lens on the D2X is the equivalent of about a 52 mm "normal" lens on the 35mm film camera. So if you have the usual collection of lenses you’re going to find they’re mostly telephoto. The other problem is that when you switch lenses you’re liable to get dust on the CCD array. You can get the dust off, but it’s a nuisance because even the tiniest dust particle may show up as a problem in the picture.

Professional cameras come at two levels. There's a camera most magazines describe with the wretched word "prosumer," evidently trying to indicate that they're somewhere between a professional camera and a consumer camera. When I began giving this lecture cameras that fell into the "prosumer" category included the Canon EOS-10D and the Nikon D100, both at around $1,500 for the body without lenses. Nowadays those cameras have been replaced by Canon and Nikon SLRs that sell for about the same price but are much more competent cameras. The Canon and Nikon SLRs can use the same lenses you'd use for a 35mm camera and both use a sensor that's roughly 2/3 the size of a full-frame 35mm, so if you already own a collection of Canon or Nikon lenses and want to switch to digital, check out the choices. The choices keep proliferating at a tremendous rate.

At a much higher price come the "true" professional digitals such as the Nikon D3 with 12.1 megapixels and a top ISO of 25,600, and the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III with 21.1 megapixels and a top ISO of 3,200. The EOS-1Ds and the D3 both have "full frame" sensors, meaning sensors that are the same size as a 35mm film frame. The advantage of a full-frame sensor is that a 50mm "normal" lens actually gives you a 50mm look at the world instead of a 75mm look -- the standard for most digital single-lens reflex cameras. These top-of-the-line cameras are faster and more rugged than their less expensive counterparts and have features that speed up a shoot. I can vouch for the ruggedness of the D2X, the D3's predecessor. A couple summers ago I managed to fall down two steps on a sidewalk in Victor, Colorado while I was shooting pictures and not watching where I was walking. My D2X hit the sidewalk hard enough to bend the lens barrel on my 24-120 zoom and total  the lens, but the camera body survived unscathed except for a few scratches. After the local fire department swabbed the gravel out of my forehead I was able to put another lens on the camera and go on shooting. There aren't many cameras out there that can survive that kind of shock.

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