i want to spenddddddd

Recently at College Radio Station we received the Galaxie 500 Peel Sessions CD, and upon playing the excellent first track, "Submissions" (which turns out to be a Sex Pistols cover) on a radio show, I downloaded the CD to my iTunes. Now I'm obsessed with the band, odd because I usually can't stand shoegazer stuff, but this has just the right amount of psych to make it good. I'm so obsessed that I've developed a jones for the Galaxie 500 box set, which can be procured on half.com used for around $60. It's still out of my music=buying budget, and far down the list of things I should be spending my money on. Alas.

In the meantime, I've had my eyes on even more expensive luxury items. I've lusted after my own a Pentax 67 medium format camera since I used one as a photography student in college, but the $2,000 I could easily shell out on one has never entered into the realm of financial reality for me. Since experiencing the joys of casual photography with a digital camera, and pondering the inevitability of learning digital photography on a more serious level, I've started thinking about investing in a digital camera.

I know a little about film cameras, but digital cameras are a mystery to me. I'm afraid of making the mistake I made when I bought my first 35mm film camera: buying a "nice" new camera from a mall camera store that cost about $350, a Canon Rebel EOS. When I started to learn about photography, I realized that these cameras are a total ripoff. Once you learn how to adjust the aperature and shutter speed to get a good exposure (which is really freaking easy), you dont need all of the annoying presets that come with this kind of camera. You can get a great used Nikon 35mm at a decent camera store for around $150 and spend the extra $200 on a nice tripod and cable release - enough to take photos as nice as you'll see in a museum.

I'm trying to avoid a similar experience with the purchase of a digital camera, but internet recommendations are usually made by professional photographers, i.e. assholes who take dull pictures of sunsets and are really into useless bells and whistles. I think a high-end consumer digital SLR like this might be good, but what I really want is something with around 6 megapixels that allows me basic manual controls without those useless "portrait" and "close-up" modes or the (also useless) ability to take a 5-second digital video. Does such a thing even exist?

Oh, right, it doesn't matter, because I don't have the money to pay for it anyway. Whew.