I'd been wanting to go digital with my photography hobby for a few years, and purchased a nice Nikon Coolpix only to find it was fine for casual shots but still not what I need for my action shots and more serious work. But the digital SLRs were too new, too expensive, and have too few of the feature I felt they needed for the price. When the Canon 10D came out, and I started reading the great reviews on it, I finally knew the time had come! After a few months of using it, I can report that I am totally happy I made the switch!
First, even though Canon made lots of improvements over the D60, they lowered the price considerably. This camera has pretty much everything I need. The one big negative for most people, the fact that your focal lengths are multiplied by 1.6 is actually a bonus for me since I shoot almost exclusively with telephoto. If you do ultra-wideangle stuff, this is certainly a problem.
Being able to switch the ISO setting is great. Sure, I could always swap my film mid-roll if I had to, but always had to waste a few frames, and it was always a pain to do. Not a problem now, just a simple camera setting. I shot some indoor stuff at both 1600 and 3200, the 3200 was not real useable, but the 1600 was pretty decent, particularly after some clean-up in Photoshop.
That's of course the biggest advantage I find with digital. There's so much that I can do in Photoshop that I couldn't easily do with film. There's some excellent books out there on using Photoshop for digital photographers, and there are some great actions and filters that will help automate your corrections. I sell all my photos online through a website that handles all the printing and shipping for me as well, and does a great job with all my shots.
I love being able to immediately see the shot that I took. I don't always have time between shots, but I can often review them later, and delete directly from the camera any obviously bad ones, and show off some of the great ones! It's a great learning tool and my skills have already started to improve as a result.
Another great feature with digital is the EXIF information that gets embedded in the digital files. No need to record your shooting parameters, just open the file up in Photoshop (or other program that supports it) and you have all the information on your shot: date and time taken, fstop used, maximum fstop, shutter speed, exposure and white balance settings, focal length, etc. Really great particularly if you are just learning.
The camera functions and menus are pretty easy to use and fairly intuitive, particularly if you are used to Canons as I was. The quality of your photos will be greatly improved with good lenses, don't spend this much for a camera and then get cheap lenses! Good glass is really essential.
I would also strongly suggest that you get a USB 2.0 or Firewire compact flash reader for your computer rather than trying to download directly from the camera using the rather slow USB 1.1. If you shoot lots of photos this is practically essential, I can easily fill a couple of 1 gig cards in a session.
Most of the gripes I have with the camera are fairly minor. I would like more than 6MP, more autofocus sensors, larger buffer (to handle more than 9 shots at a time), more frames a second, etc. But for the price, I don't think you will find a better digital camera,
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