Help me choose a camera!

[Andrew_AXA]

Good afternoon fellow photographers. My name is Andy, I'm 17 years old, and I've been a casual photographer for about 4 years now. Here's my situation:

I bought a Pentax Optio S4i a couple of years ago. This was the result of about a month or so of scrutinizing every camera I could find within my price range. The S4i had mixed reviews, but it looked like it would serve my purposes fairly well. It did, although I was slightly disappointed with a couple of things. Anyway, I took to letting my sister borrow it whenever she asked, and of course, she lost it. This was a couple of months ago.

Now, I've been meaning to buy a new camera, but haven't had the money until now (just got my tax return back and paid my bills for the month). I've got about $800 to spend, so price isn't really an issue. I want to get into photography more seriously, so I've been considering purchasing a Digital Rebel off Ebay. My question to you all is, is there a camera better suited to my situation, perhaps for a bit cheaper? I have no problem going all out for a top-of-the-line camera, but it's been a while since I perused the market and I really have no idea what's been released in the past year or so. My essentials would be: a decent zoom, great image quality (a must), preferably a fairly quick and powerful flash, and I'd really appreciate a good set of manual controls. This was my main gripe with the S4i, I hated having practically no control over the pictures I was taking.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Andy

[patsfan]

Andy

take a look at the Konica Minolta 5D has some real good features like anti-shake in the camera body not in the lenses. And it is in your price range New and not used off of Ebay

Mike

[rey]

Checkout the "Amateur Digital SLR" section of Steve's Best:

http://www.steves-digicams.com/best_cameras.html