I purchased the camera to take pictures of my pastel work to produce prints from and I have been out and about with the camera since I bought it.I shoot with RAW files, so if you have Photoshop, beware that you can only use CS4 versions of the program with the update at Adobe's site. The Pentax program is cumbersome and slow.My decision to go with the Pentax was user interface and having quite a bit of older lenses from my SLR days. The lenses are 25+ years old, in perfect conidition and they work with the Kx's aperture setting if you set them in A mode. So that was a plus for me ... The Kit lens is fun for auto focus, but its a plastic mount. I bike the city a lot in Baltimore so Im always on the move with the camera since I got it. Invest in a better lens rather than the kit lenses with more than the 18-55mm. It will be worth if you swap a lot and wear on the mount is an issue.... I was on the fence with this and the Rebel XSi, but after holding the Canon in my hand, I felt the Kx was super solid, feels great, and it a dream to use compared to the XSi.The only downfall I hear is battery life. Well you need to update the firmware on the camera and it will show an accurate battery level indicator on the display. I got about 400 shots on the included batteries in RAW format with only 40-50 using the flash before they died. If you update the firmware and you use a Mac, you need to have a seperate SD card reader as the 10.6 OS on the Mac will not let you copy the firmware file to the camera. (I havent figured it out, but if you are Mac savy, you should be able to do this without an additional card reader).If you are considering this camera at all, buy it. The Video is better than almost all in this level of camera and it works with your old K-mount lenses!

I've spent most of my life using point and shoot cameras and not particularly good ones at that. After spending most of my time of being fed up with shots that didn't focus where I wanted them to and cameras that couldn't negotiate any sort of depth of field, I decided I'd step up to a DSLR. Since I've recently come to France to spend a year abroad teaching at a university (and potentially traveling around Europe in my time off) I decided that this would be a worthwhile investment and, though I'm learning as I go, I'm sure this was the right choice. The ease of use is fantastic and simply reading through the user's manual has allowed me to understand some of the basic dynamics and fundamentals I'll need in utilizing the K-x. It's simple, it's easy and most of all: it was affordable.