Depends whether you live your life by modern marketing mantra that as soon as they have something new to sell, what they were selling, is suddenly old-hat, and no good.... no matter what they said when it was the new-kiddie-on-the-block!
Digital SLR's have been available over the counter for perhaps 20 years. In that time they have had to come down in price a heck of a lot, and they have had to get the specs up a heck of a lot.... BUT, they still do what we were doing for years with film... take a bludy picture.... and how pretty whatever you are taking snap off, wont likely look better next year or in five years or a hundred, just 'cos the camera you might use, could be newer!
The Specs of consumer digital SLR's have in the last ten years continued to go up, while prices have come down to a market tolerated entry threshold, around the £500 mark. But.... while the year-on-year gains in technical specs WERE probably needed before that, to achieve an acceptable image quality to rival film for the first decade or so, in the last decade, an AWFUL lot of the 'Sales Specs' are to convince customers that its the latest must have techno-widget.. and the specs they most stridently promote, like Mega-Pixies, are often NOT really the specs that are even all that important.
For example; my first Digital Camera of almost twenty years ago. was a little 1.3 Mega-Pixel compact, bought when they fell into the under £100 price range, and 1.3 Mega-Pixies was 'almost' as good as any other compact could do as far as IQ went. Now, fifteen years on, that spec is surpassed many times over, and the Digital-SLR I bought five tears ago, boasted a 'then' audacious for entry level DSLR of 24 Mega-Pixies.... which for the large part are utterly irrelevant....
Almost no photo I take ends up a hard-copy actual 'photo' on the wall or anywhere else. Everything gets viewed on a computer screen, at best, and whatever drives that, will diddle-the-digits to show however many pixies it mas in its array... typically around 1024 x 768.. which works out at 0.78 Million-Pixels.... some TV sets may be able to show more, most mobile phones less, but that is about as many pixels as will commonly be seen... so whats the point making gazzilion times more NOT to be seen? And, in fact, most photo's have to be down-sized to be published anywhere on the net, whether on this forum or on a photo-host site like boto-fhucket, and others like farce-broke, will probably do it for you, automatically, down-sizing and compressing any photo you try and up-load to them to save band-width and server-space.... Err... that means that ANY digital photo, I have EVER taken, since 2002 or whenever it was is STILL too big to upload and display on the web, "Full-Size".. it's STILL gonna need its digits diddled!
That's Mega-Pixies, the most commonly quoted 'metric' for how good or old fashioned a camera might be... and it makes bog all odds!
Some more important things have been improved, and some significantly so; for example that old Digi-Pact of two-decades ago had a 'native' sensor sensitivity of I think just ISO50, and user 'settings' that meant you could elect 2x amplification to shoot it at ISO100 or 4x amplification to shoot it at ISO400...... which was in it's day relatively impressive. Current Electric-Picture-Maker, a DSLR, has ISO settings from ISO100, up to ISO6400, with a couple of 'boost' settings above that.... that's like a couple of stops faster than the fastest of fast film I could get my hands on years back! And it's not just the effective speed that's increased, its the contrast and lack of noise, which is much harder to describe with a nice neat number on the box......
And that's the point.... these things are ever harder to even describe, let alone quantify, even less put on a label in the shop.
Ten year old camera? Hah! That's an embryo son! I have cameras on the shelf that are 50! years old or more! They still take photos! They can still take GOOD photo's, and some argue that not having all the electrickery in them of modern offerings they encourage some-one to be a bit more thoughtful and likely to take BETTER photos.....
To wit?
Your call.
IF you think that a few maga-picxies is important in the bragging rights... its important in the bragging rights, so you gotta have'em.. just be warned there will ALWAYS be some-one with something newer and with bigger numbers in the book... whether its a camera, a car or a bra....
On T'Other hand... if you recognize it for what it is, a picture making machine; that did that when new, and can still do that now... go take pictures with the thing.... they will be as good as they ever could be from that camera, and YOU have the ability to make them... end of the day its good photographers that take good photos, the camera dont do it for them, and there's plenty of fantastic cameras chucking out dross taken by clue-less numpties......
Any camera made in the last decade aught to be more than 'good enough' for most, and most likely better than the person using it.
Remember it's NOT the camera that makes the difference, 99.9% of it is down to YOU. There may be things that a better camera or a better lens might do that may be more or less helpful.. IF you know what you are about... but the gear dont do the job, YOU DO.... so your best bet is to just go take photo's; learn the craft, make mistakes, work out what you did wront to make them, and do something different not to make them again... it will NOT be in the camera or lens you buy, it will be in what you learn... so go learn.
