Years ago, I saved up enough money to buy a new "do everything" 35mm SRL called a Minolta XD-11. It was awesome, the quality of it's pictures and the accuracy of the thing (exposure, etc) was superb. At the time, the complexity of SLR was just starting to take off, and unlike the incomprehensible Canon A-1, the Minolta seemed to have been given lots of thought. Unfortunately, I broke the lens of a telescope I had and had to replace it at pretty high cost so I ended up selling the camera. Later, because I wanted to do astrophotography, I bought the mainstay camera for that, the Olympus OM-1 and stuck with it. But Minolta genuinely seems to be interested in the consumer if you look at the way they designed their current digital SLR. Rather than cheap out on it, they chose a medium between quality, functionality and price that at least put them at the upper end of the basic DSLR market. Now they have the D5 out which is catering more to the novice crowd and yet it has kept the main attributes of the D7. Good luck to them.