Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Thanks for all the suggestions. A few more things I realized after some researches:
1) Budget hopefully 2) No need for special lens or etc. I think those "kit len" would be good enough.
3) Not planning to blow my photos up to posters, at least not planning to at the moment.
4) Low light, low light, low light. I think this is what I'm focusing on. If I can get low light and moving kids without flash or too grainy of a photo (sometimes it is outdoor during family event, won't have time to "setup" fill flash or other fancy stuff), I'll be happy.
5) I'm biased toward mirrorless due to weight, but they seems to not have many used models for good price like older DSLR.
6) I use a tripod for some family event group photos (so everyone can be in), having a location for tripod mount would be good (almost every camera has it).
7) No need for external accessories like flash, shutter control, etc.
I think you'll be fine with the D3400. If you want to try different angles, the D5500 would also work as you can tilt the display to different angles. It's going to be way better than any phone camera. I primarily use an 18-105 but they have the newer 18-140 which is somewhat cheap if you get it refurbished. The 18-200 is still somewhat expensive, but it's a good all around lense. I've got a bunch of other ones like the 35mm 1.8, but I don't use it that much. My other primary one is a Sigma 10-20mm but that's more for real estate work. For fill flash, I think you can just leave it in automatic and hit the flash button and use the built in flash, it's still better than a phone flash and the kit lense is fine with the built in flash. Never got into mirrorless because the lenses are more limited. I have about 6-7 other lenses.