I gave my old manual slr to a photography student, it was a Pentax mx that had served me well for over twenty years and was the camera I used to get LRPS accreditation and various other bits of paper.
Now I use an obsolete Nikon D70 and third party lenses still a superb camera despite the annoying lack of built in cable operated remote shutter release. My first DSLR and second hand at that and the camera that got me back into photography after a lapse of about eight years.
Oddly, when I did get back into photography with the digital camera, I continued to use it in more or less the same way as I used to use my old manual cameras. The fantastic programming it is supposed to have I have forgotten about, as for my kind of photography, well I am doing much the same as I always used to do. All that has changed really, is the media.
But my advice to those wanting to get into digital photography, is as another has said here, go for a second hand camera, get used to it and then see if it is what you want to do, as it strikes me there is far too much hype attached to consumer photography, people are being sold what they have very little if any use for, but salesmen are in the business to sell cameras to anyone they can sucker into buying. The other thing is, when you get used to that camera, it does what you require of it, you might lose interest in the latest all singing all dancing mega pixel monster and there just concentrate on good photography.
My next camera, well, either another D70 body or a D70S so I can convert a D70 to record infra red as a priority and visible light as a secondary and fit a facility to accept a cable release, ( I am not doing it when I have only the one camera).
