I need a better digital and preferably a digital slr. I am doing a digital photography course and may possibly have a job doing pregnancy, baby, child photography in the near future. (Have done reg. photography course in the past.)

I mentioned it to my mother and she has a Dell card (hence buying it from there) that she offered me to use to buy this and I'd pay it back next year with our tax return. ANYWAY, the price tag scares me (it's more than my first car was! :lol: Yes, I am CHEAP!), but I wanted to get opinions about this camera, anyway, though I have a feeling I'll be too scared to buy it! hehe

TIA!

Home & Home Office: D40 6.1 MP Digital SLR Camera (with 18-55 mm Lens) (http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=A1116228)

My sister has the D40 and loves it. She doesn't live near me so I haven't really played with it but a couple of times. It is very similar to mine though and mine was the step up. I have the Nikon D70. I love it. I want to take courses in the future but even for a photo dummy it is very easy to use in the auto mode. I am reading as much as I can about photograpy and hope to take some classes in the future. I was scared to spend that kind of money but I feel it was really worth it.

It's been talked about some on this forum, try a search for it.

I do not have one, so I've only paid a little bit of attention. There's something about how not all lenses may be compatible with it? I don't know for sure. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the consensus is that it's a great camera.

As far as using it to do paid photography, I guess I can't answer that either. ;)

That is a good camera but I "think" it is getting pretty outdated as far as professional work goes.

I think it's a great starter camera, but if you were wanting to do pro work you'd probably grow out of it pretty quickly. You're also limited by only being able to use AF-S lenses if you want auto focus. That means that some of the more popular lenses (ie 50mm) would be manual focus only on the D40.

If you're going to buy from Dell, you might want to check out the Rebel XT or XTi cameras instead.