Digital SLR Camera

Totally non-food related, but I have been wanting to buy a dSLR for quite some time now. Harvey Norman is currently having a sale on, and they have their Olympus E-300 for $999. I want!! Went to Myer Megamart to see if they could beat the price, but they say they can only match it as $999 is 'below cost'. Even Rob's friend can't get it cheaper wholesale priced.

It's been such a long time since I dabbled in photography (that being in high school!), but it's something that I have always been interested to do - same with astronomy and music. Never had the money nor the opportunity to buy an SLR camera, telescope or a piano :P. And it seemed that with our overseas plans, things like that weren't likely gonna happen for a few years.. But I've waited long enough, and I need an artistic hobby to keep me sane :)

Anyway, so Rob and I trudged down to Harvey Norman to have a look at the camera and to purchase it (where, coincidentally, Ian was also looking at a digital camera - it was funny: we were standing by the camera display cabinet waiting for the salesguy to finish up serving these two people, and we waited for at least two minutes before I glanced over (somewhat impatiently) at the couple taking up my precious time, and did a double take when I recognised my brother). The salesguy takes out the camera and lets me play with it!!! But that's the sad part because I started becoming unsure of what I ought to be looking for, and doubted if I should get the camera then and there. The main thing that I worried about was the fact that the focus dial on the E-300 seemed to be a dummy dial - i.e. it seemed that the camera can only auto-focus. I asked the guy, and he tried to turn manual focus on, failed, then consulted the manual and said "Hm, it does look like it only has an auto-focus function", to which I replied "Auto-focus? That's unusual for an SLR camera!". Sigh. Anyway, the salesguy finally saw in the manual that in order to learn to use the manual focus, you need to consult the "Advanced Manual" which is on a CD. Highly inconvenient. Anyway I decided to do a little bit more research on SLR cameras before I take the leap to buy it..