I wrote a whole bunch of stuff about this earlier today, and we had a disaster drill ... and I came back to a computer that had been rebooted. GRrr. Anyway, to sum up what I said earlier: I got my first SLR when I was in fourth grade, which was in 1972. I bought it for $200. It was a Pentax Spotmatic. I asked myself back then these same questions, about what's the big difference between the SLR and my Pocket Insta-matic? Two of the key differences between SLR cameras and most range-finder cameras that tipped the scales for me still are important and exist today. These differences are: 1. With SLRs, WYSIWYG. In other words, what you see through your viewfinder is essentially what the lens and film plane sees (or, in the case of digital cameras, the sensor), so you can shoot a full-frame photo and not cut off heads or left arms or whatever, and it affords you a greater measure of control. 2. Lenses can be changed to give you much more creative freedom. Extreme telephotos that are 1000 mm, three feet long and have 25 pounds of glass in them; or extra wide angle; fisheye; shift lenses; portrait shorter telephotos; fixed-focus f50 lenses; whatever. It's meant a lot more to me over the years than I thought it would back in elementary school, particularly when shooting sports and rodeos and the like. The third key difference, which is greater exposure control, really doesn't exist to any large degree anymore. Digital cameras give you all kinds of freedom over exposures that a lot of the range-finder cameras of bygone days never did. You can set f-stop and manually focus if you want to, be aperture priority or shutter priority, etc., etc., so you're going to do well with almost any decent digital in this respect. I am getting my first digital SLR this Christmas, after a long dry spell. I've had a digital, namely an Olympus c3030, for several years, and it's very cool, but I'm going to need my control back, so I'm going with an Olympus E-500. That's just my choice, and, with adapter, I'll be able to use my old Olympus Zuiko OM series lenses, so it will be a benefit to me. Plus the price is right, at about $750 for camera body and one lens. It's 8.1 MP. The new 24 MP sensor was just announced, what was it, last week? That will be amazing. There currently is a Canon that is 16 MP, but the body alone is going for somewhere between $6,000 and $8,000, I think. In conclusion (whew), I'd agree with tibet2004uk that digital is very fun, and, in my opinion, the way to go for the very reasons you yourself stated. Why pay for film and processing when you can get great digital images that will fill a poster with a beautiful image? If you're wanting to learn about the "guts" of photography, though, I'd take the hard road, as Cynlee suggests, and do it the old fashioned way: Do it with a trusty 50 mm SLR, produce your own black and white prints, and the whole works. You really learn what all those numbers mean to you as a creative artist. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of numbers and a camera that focuses for you. Don't get me wrong. I love autofocus and beautifully exposed photos with very little effort. BUT, when you want to do things that are out-of-the-ordinary, you need to know how all the components work together. Just my .02