There is going to be one!
Right now!
Here's Pt 1.5. Just some comments...:
- The kit lens is a valuable resource. I just bought one. It's a little soft, but it's cheap, and it's not THAT soft. It's slow, so you're probably going to be using the flash indoors. Also, it has 'zoom creep'. That means that the lens will extend/retract if you hold the camera at a steep angle or vertical (pointing up or down).
- Full Manual is pretty easy, although there's only one dial for adjusting settings. Additionally, some settings are a little irritating to turn on and off, such as the Depth of Field Preview (optical vs digital). It's definitely a huge step up in terms of learning the basics compared to just pushing a button and hoping the camera does what you want.
- Plugging the camera into your PC will eat the batteries. I don't know why. You'd think the camera could be powered by USB power, but nope. My P&S did the same thing.
- If you wear glasses, the viewfinder's display becomes difficult to read in bright sunlight because light will get in between you and the viewfinder. (I can't use a magifying viewfinder thing without glasses because I have rather bad astigmatism and have to wear glasses or else rectangles turn into slanty trapezoid things.)
- The focusing screen is not very good. It's not bad, it's just a piece of ground glass. no rangefinder prism, no weird little magnified circle of ground glass stuff. Apparently, you can buy replacement screens from some company that feature all kinds of goodies. I am scared of doing that. (I'm comparing to my dad's old Nikon SLR, which has the prism and stuff. It's very easy to focus.)
- The auto-focus system still is super awesome for manual focus. *twist* *beep!*. One downside is that you end up kind of waffling back and forth, since invariably it beeps and you keep twisting a little.
- The LCD cannot be used to judge exposure; you need the histogram and bright highlights turned on. The LCD is very high contrast; your pictures will 'POP' on it, when in reality they're being saved as neutral toned jpegs (or RAW).
If I was going to say, right now, whether or not I was happy with the K100D, I would say, "I am very happy I bought this camera." It certainly doesn't have the spontaneity of my little P&S, since I have to haul it out of the bag and take off the lens cap... but the pictures come out uniformly higher-quality and I vastly enjoy using it more.
The shake reduction alone is an awesome feature. I've taken a few shots at 1/8s or slower where they wouldn't have come out at all otherwise.
I'd also recommend the 50mm F/1.4 lens, especially if you take a lot of shots in weird light. It's not too expensive, and while kind of 'long', and soft (especially with regards to the chromatic aberration as you can see in the pic of my old camera) you can take pictures in near-dark if you can hold the camera steady.