INTRODUCTION
I'm going to to on and on below about personal experience, so feel free to skip ahead to the real differences between Nikon and Canon.Nikon and Canon are as good as each other. Each are multi-billion dollar optical companies who have been making some of the world's best optics for numerous consumer, military and industrial applications for decades and decades and decades.
Each makes lenses as parts of multi-million-dollar steppers used in making electronic chips with more precision anything needed for photography, and each make other optics that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars in other applications. They each make our cameras and lenses out of the same stuff from which they create these other products.
I don't extend this same awe towards discount lensmakers, but I do have this respect for Nikon and Canon and Pentax and LEICA and Fuji and Zeiss who've been making much more than cameras for longer than I've been alive. I do have a hat off to Tokina, who are related to Hoya, who are as far as I know the biggest maker of optical glass on the planet, and whose glass is found in parts of everyone's lenses.
