So, there’s a lot about camera naming that bothers me. What, you might ask, has me on this rant? Well, two things.

The other day we had a call asking about trading a Pentax K1000, and it took me a minute to remember that was a film body, I was mentally confusing it with the K1000D, a somewhat dated but still nice consumer DSLR. 1 letter in this case is a big difference.

And, just now, we had a call about a Rebel X. Yup, just “X”, which was of course before the age of digital also, going back to a time when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular the first time around. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d get to use seriously.

Looking up the exact specs of the Rebel X I found out it was a variant of another model, the Rebel XS. Not to be confused with the Rebel Xs, which is a new Canon digital SLR camera. Note the tricky capitalization difference. OK, sure, technical digital Rebels are called, well, Digital Rebels actually, but who calls them that in everyday conversation? EOS Rebel maybe, but Digital Rebel?

Other confusions include the D40 (a consumer Nikon digital SLR camera) and the 40D (a prosumer Canon digital SLR camera), a mess made further obnoxious by the D60 (current Nikon) and the D60 (dated Canon).

More? How about the P80 and D80 (more of a problem in phone conversations, but has lead to some misunderstandings).

The E-1 was the first professional caliber DSLR in the Olympus digital camera world. The E1 is one of the Canon PowerShot digital cameras aimed at theyounger demographics.

I give up. We need better names.

Tags: 1000D, body, camera, Canon, d40, d60, d80, digital cameras, dslr, eos, Nikon, Olympus, pentax, powershot, powershot digital, rebel xs, roberts