[pressld2]

Welcome to WAB Ian! There are some good questions there but I suspect no hard and fast answers to any of 'em! We all have our own preferences and our own opinions on what's most important to us. So I'll kick off with my opinions anyway...

Firstly, full frame versus cropped sensor. I'm shooting with a Nikon D300 at present which has a 1.5x crop factor sensor. Personally I like this as it gives me extra reach which is great for most non-macro wildlife. My 80-400 behaves like a 120-600. As I still regularly find myself wishing I could get closer I would hate to sacrifice the "extra 200mm" by switching to a full frame sensor. The only downside in terms of image quality that I can see is at high ISO settings where cameras like the D3 and D700 really shine. If I could afford a 500mm prime then I'd want to hang a full frame sensor on the back of it - no question! But as I can't I prefer the cropped sensor.

When it comes to burst rate the D300 offers 6 frames per second (I could get this up to 8 by buying a different battery). The truth is I hardly ever use it though. These days I am shooting in 14bit raw which cuts the burst down to 3 fps. At one of his talks Andy Rouse said he wasn't keen on high burst rates because it tended to produce a nice and sharp first shot followed by a lot of soft ones caused by the mirror flapping up and down. My dislike of it stems mostly from the way it fills a 4 gig memory card in double quick time and leaves me with too many "similars" when downloading and editing.

As I said, these are just my personal preferences. There are plenty of people getting great shots using different kit and methods.

Dave P.