Need camera for kids sports

[paulspeese]

my wife's birthday is tomorrow. She wants a camera for taking digital pics of kids sports, Swimming and Track mostly. Her number one issue is the speed of the shutter, she is late for most pictures. Number two issue is range, being able to take clear shots from 50-100 feet away.

Price range is $500-$1000
any suggestions?

[Tel]

D70 with a nice zoom lens? That'd be pretty expensive, But the D70 Is pretty fast IMO.

[jorgemonkey]

The D70 is a pretty good camera. I used to use mine shooting some soccer & mountain biking. The AF was ok, but its nothing compared to my D2h.

But my vote would be something like the D70 & a 70-200 f2.8. I have the Sigma version and I absolutely love it.

[Jaedon]

The Olympus E500 comes with 2 lenses ( if you buy the 2 lens kit you get a 14-45f3.5 - 5.6 and a 40 - 150 f3.5 - 4.5) and is fairly fast for shooting sports. Easy to use and the AF is decently fast. No where near as fast as Cannon's AF (comparing my E500 to a Cannon 30D) but in the end I turned out better shots than the 30D since I had to wait for the shot instead of blasting away at 5fps and hoping the AF was locking.

[JSPhoto]

welcome to the Forum, and hello to Doylestown

For track you should be OK with most cameras as it's outdoors, the only problem you may have is if it's under the lights and then you need higher ISO of 800-1600 and an f2.8 lens. The D70 is OK, but I'm not a Nikon fan. I'd look into a used 20D Canon or similar, especially for the swimming side of things.
Shooting swimming is trcky, many school pools have poor lighting, it may look OK to your eye but the camera sees it differently. Also you have to deal with humidity, and plastic type camera bodies don't deal well with that.
As for shutter speed, I don't think that is her problem, but more shutter LAG. There isn't much you can do there except learn to anticipate things and shoot sooner than you would normally to compensate for the shutter lag. You won't escape shutter lag until you hit the high end cameras.

JS

[paulspeese]

Thank you very much, that helps a lot. Off to the web to go shopping!!