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If your starting photography, I would try a good P&S that has control of aperture,. shutter and manual. It's easier to carry. Most DSLR kit lenses won't give you significant better quality pictures than a P&S camera. I would read various photography web sites.

The following are my favorite sites:
photo.net anything there is great reading.

lensrental.com: the owner has gone the gamut of different purchase, DSLR with cheap lenses, expensive zooms, expensive primes.
Lenses Don't Collect the Whole Set

Best Canon EOS lenses

Canon Lenses Reviews

And as another note, I would ask what type of pictures are you taking. Because there isn't one universal solution.
Option 1: I was very happy for years with a high end point and shoot like the Canon Powershot models. And really like the ones that use AA batteries. The upper end models have full control over aperture and shutter. And I was able to experiment with try different type of pictures. At the top, the G12 has one of the best lenses for a P&S. I usually went with lower priced models like the SX130/SX150. The SX130/SX150 use AA batteries. I kept spare rechargeable and spare alkaline AA batteries so I rarely had problems of batteries. Limitations: No interchangeable lens. Dust and water can easily damage camera.

Option 2: Waterproof/Shockproof/Dustproof camera. I would pick one of these for travel. They should be able to handle beaches, storms, etc.

Option 3: Indoor photography. I started to take indoor photography where flash is prohibited or the subject was too far away. So I needed something with a fast lens. This option eliminates almost all Point and Shoot cameras. I bought a DSLR with a 50 mm (f1.8) lens just to get the feel of this photography. And was able to take indoor pictures that were impossible with a P&S camera. I added a 100mm f2.0 lens to take indoor gymnasium sports photos. Limitations: larger, not as convenient to carry.

Other options: scaba diving, outdoor sports, race cars, museums, portraits, travel etc.

I haven't used the smaller 4:3 frame cameras. I do like the smaller size. But I like the versatility of the DSLR or the compactness of a P&S.

WhatMeWorry!

> most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers
Clearly optics isn't one of his strengths.

Anything beyond around 20 feet in a dark theater is infinity focus for the human eye and more like 6 feet in daylight.

What this means is your eye focuses the same for any objects 20 feet away or further, Such as when sitting in a theater.

So as long as the 3D isn't projecting images out of the screen at you, your eyes aren't going to notice anything unusual in focusing.

So it's all up to how the 3D content was shot.

Technical details:

What we want to know is the hyper focal distance of the eye,.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance The closest point of focus at a given aperture, at which infinity falls within the Depth of Field

Optics of the human eye By David A. Atchison, George Smith PG 214 has a nice graph on this.
http://books.google.com/books?id=MHgx-jBA0TAC&lpg=PP11&ots=DGJxkLC644&dq=depth%20of%20field%20human%20eye&lr&pg=PA214#v=onepage&q=depth%20of%20field&f=false

Astronomers the maximum iris opening is 7mm this gives a max aperture is f/3.5.
Wikipedia says f/2.1 to f/8.3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertures

The focal length of the eye is 17 mm http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/JuliaKhutoretskaya.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertseber/2372620675/ Optimal Aperture For Foreground Sharpness With Infinity Focus
http://www.dofmaster.com/charts.html
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/technical/dofcalc.html

I have some article on my blog about 3D content issues.
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2010/08/thx-and-blufocus-join-forces-to-certify.html
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-bad-3d-not-3d-glasses-gives-you.html

You can actually get an EOS body to F lens adapter. It's purely mechanical, so no autofocus or automatic aperture, but since the Canon EF lens mount is shorter and wider, Nikon lenses can be mechanically mounted, and focus to infinity (no extension tube effect). See Wikipedia and Bob Atkins for more information. I've acquired some stunningly cheap manual-focus Nikon F-mount lenses which work quite well with my Digital Rebel.

Canon said the same thing last year:

"The RAW file format is proprietary and is designed to extract the maximum information form the image. On the other hand there is value in standardization, which makes it easier for software to deal with the files. However standardization makes it more difficult to change and improve the format. With a proprietary RAW file we can make changes and improvements quickly to deal with advances in camera technology. We have no problems with the Adobe proposal for standardization, but for now we will stick with our own proprietary RAW format."

http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/canon plans.html

One of the reasons extolled at length for choosing one type against abother is that a DSLR has a narrow depth of field and a "standard" digital camera has a greater depth. As anyone who knows about photography would know this is total tosh.

Actually, the article was perfectly right about that. I didn't like the way it dumbed the whole subject down, but it was correct in saying that non-DSLRs usually provide a greater depth of field --- because they do, in fact many times greater.

If you want the maths, here's a recognized authority on the subject, Bob Atkins. It's easy to summarize the relevant point:

Depth of Field (DoF) is inversely proportional to the linear size of the sensor, ie. CMOS or CCD or old fashioned film. Taking the standard 24x36mm frame of 35mm film as the basis for comparison, the most commonly used DSLR sensors employ the "APS-C" size which is just a little bit smaller: for example, Canon's 20D has a CMOS sensor 1.6 times smaller than 35mm film, and the Nikon D70 has a CCD sensor 1.5 times smaller than 35mm film. As a result, DSLRs provide slightly more DoF than 35mm cameras if all the other variables are left the same. 1.5 or 1.6 is not really a significant amount though.

In contrast, digital non-DSLRs almost all use *much* smaller sensors: for example, the Nikon E3100 is perfectly typical in employing a sensor with linear dimensions 6.5 times smaller than 35mm film, and hence 4+ times smaller than DSLRs. This is a very marked difference, and is immediately noticeable in the greatly increased DoF in almost any landscape shot containing nearby trees and distant horizons. Obviously other factors come into the equation as well, but by far the most significant factor for broadly similar conditions and lenses is the sensor size.

If you don't like maths, convince yourself by looking at photo galleries that provide full EXIF info for their shots. You'll find non-DSLR shots at f/2.8 over 1/60s in UK-style weak sunshine with a DoF all the way from 30 yards to the horizon, which is quite impossible with a DSLR. That said, I much prefer my DSLR, since I love the effect of narrow DoF.

Many photography magazines (and web sites) are slammed for wasting so much time on equipment, like lens tests. After all, a mediocre camera in the right hands still yields good results, and a good camera in the wrong hands is useless.

So when photographers start into computers, what do the computer guys do? They write articles with a bunch of pseudo-scientific "tests" that are just as bad as anything PopPho does.

I'm kind of embarassed to be a computer scientist.

Look at all the comments that this article generated. If all of those were lines of code (or documentation) for Gimp or Linux, who knows, maybe we'd have real color calibration on Linux by now.