agreed, even if you aren't really serious about ever being a 'great photographer' - the prime lenses are just dramatically superior to anything else in the 'wi

agreed, even if you aren't really serious about ever being a 'great photographer' - the prime lenses are just dramatically superior to anything else in the 'within reason' price range. though if you are on one of the SLRs that makes everything a telephoto, you might want to start with a 35mm or a 28mm rather than the 50mm, even though the 50 is a better lens for the money. If you take indoor photos with the 50 on my D30, you end up trying to get as far away as possible from the subject, which can be hard in small apartment rooms. Even from another rank amateur, the quality difference between the primes and the affordable zoom lenses is dramatic. Honestly, most of my photography consists of taking pictures of equipment for ebay or blogging, but slap a 50mm canon prime on a ancient 3 megapixel D30 and your photos are sharp enough to read the serial numbers, even when your photographer is a shaky handed amateur, something that is decidedly not the case for the zoom lenses I've seen in that price range. Sure, once you get up into the multi-thousand dollar zooms, I'm sure the difference fades, but really, I'm just not that into it.