Anudder Blog site to expand on the confusion -

http://www.here-ugo.com/BridgeBlog/

I like Ken Rockwell's site. I like the fact that he tells you what he thinks rather than waffling.

I bought my wife a Nikon D50 a few years ago, and it has been fantastic. A few months later we were able to get one of the 18-200 VR lenses, and it is icing on the cake

You really can't go wrong with a name-brand DSLR these days.

I decided.

I went with the Canon 40D with 28-135mm lens. I added a Speedlite, spare battery, UV filter, flash card, and a few other things. It was a lot more than I thought it was going to be when I first started looking a couple months ago, but I'm sure I have a good camera system. The other cameras that I mentioned at the start of this thread all looked like they would have worked fine, but this model seemed to have all the good points from the others and a few more, too.

I bought it from OneCall.com and believe that I got a good deal. I've bought from them before about nine years ago when we bought our camcorder. They treated me nice back then and yesterday, too. FedEx will deliver it Thursday! Thanks for your inputs along the way!

It arrived today! It's out of the box and working great! Now I'm on a steep learning curve getting to know it. The manual is 195 pages (small pages with lots of diagrams), so I'm sure it'll keep me occupied for a couple days.

Please post pics.

congrats! nice stuff.

onecall.com is an incredibly good online retailer. I have used them for years and they have always been good to me.

Good move getting the IS lense. That zoom is a 38-216mm equivalent to 35mm