Best Digital Camera?

For sports action you'll want long lenses with image stabilization.

When you buy a camera you're basically buying into a lens system. That said, many pro sports photographers shoot Canon.

A great simple set up would be the Canon 50D with the Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8 IS USM telephoto lens. Make sure you'll get the IS version, not the one without it or you'll hate life.

Other long telephoto lenses are the
EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 L IS (comparatively slow)
EF 400 f/2.8 L IS (fixed focal length though)
EF 500 f/4 or EF 600 f/4

The lenses are all very expensive but matter more than anything else, including the difference between getting a slightly "lower end" body.

A cheaper option is to get the Canon 40D or even 30D (older) but you'll have to fork out some cash for the right lenses either way.

Now, this is all assuming you'll be doing this pretty seriously and in fairly large venues. If you're talking about taking snap shots of Junior at his local game, hell - get a Rebel XSI or Nikon D80 (either one with a good lens. Not the stock lens crap. A real lens.)

Hope this helps

well - for that budget - do what IM doing - Canon 40D - two quality lenses. Since youre talking action i assume sports and race cars n shit - so you will be depending on natural light - so the camera setup is 1500 - a couple good lenses are an average of 1000 each - get that and proceed to learn how to use them...

Fuck - Kroy said the same thing but much mroe in depth - Kudos

Thanks guys, some of the places I am limited in size of lens. Not sure if you can get a pass to use a longer one if you aren't a sports guy. But I wanted to also shoot nascar and maybe travel to europe to do soccer.

Thanks bro, I'm a bit of a camera geek LOL

Sports and action photography is a bit of a pain because it does require you to shoot with fast shutter speeds, meaning less light can enter the camera. This means you'll need to be able to open your iris ("f stop") as much as possible.

This in turn means that your lens will need to be as "fast" (=able to open up wide) as possible, and the f/2.8 lenses are pretty much necessary, particularly if you are shooting indoors, on overcast days or when it gets a little dark outside.

And since you'll typically be far away from the action you'll def. need a long telephoto lens.

There are some additional tricks like DX cropping on full frame Nikons and so on but that's probably a bit too deep to worry about unless you're doing it professionally.

So in short there's no way to get exactly what you want without a nice long telephoto.
But if all else fails you can certainly get the longest lens you are allowed to bring and then mess with it in post (Photoshop).

If you do that make sure you're getting a camera body with high resolution (>10M) but NOT a full frame sensor body. You'll want to take advantage of the crop factor (1.6 on Canons) which basically means a EF lens of say 100mm is actually like a 160mm, so you'll have more reach.
That's not the case with a full frame sensor camera body though.

Digital cameras

Sounds to me like you should take a look at Olympus.
The new E-3 has an extremely fast AF system, crop factor of 2x (which makes a 300mm f/2.8 into a 600mm f/2.8!) and shoots 5fps, which isn't remarkable but OK for sports. $1,100 bucks for the house and another $2,000 for a 35mm-100mm f/2 (70mm-200mm f/2.8 equivalent but half a stop faster and half the physical size!)

I'm an all-Nikon shooter myself, so I have no personal experience with the Olympus system, but from what you described about your needs it seems like a good match. Check it out!

Love Canon!