Camera for taking table tennis pictures

You don't have natural light which immediately means high ISO settings. You need at least 1.8 50mm (luckily it's cheap). The goal is to get picture at the point of contact of racket and ball, players are moving ,ball is moving, racket is moving. I mostly use settings 1/400, ISO 1600 (it's minimum) on canon 450d. But, pictures are not sharp enough, not big enough and even 1/400 is not enough to freeze playing hand of fast looper so I couldn't shoot best player's fh shots. On faster shutter, less light -> too dark images. Maybe 650d is slightly better on high ISO than 450d, but probably not too much. Seems Nikons have better high ISO performances. Also, important thing is timing, dslr has small latency, but still has some 100-200 ms, you have to know how much in advance to press shutter(you will learn after 50-100 shots). Also, even if you do all right, big percent of images can remain bad, unfocused, dark, or simply bad timing. Rapid fire, can help, but you can still easily miss the right moment, so I'd say 3-5 picures per second is not too useful. Prepare for only 5-10% of successful pictures (if you want pictures like I want, at right moment).

Here are some of my pictures:

if good lighting is present you can just use a higher shutter speed with high ISO but expect some noise. You can just post process it if you want.

fast lenses arent cheap...

what i use is 50mm 1.8 which is around 100$, pairing it with High ISO camera and set the pixels to max and just edit it to zoom in on your computer :)