I'm personally going to be getting a Pentax K10D in the next week or so. Right now I've got a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5, which is a nice point-and-shoot camera (one of the SLR-like cameras) and does take good pictures.

The essential advantage to dSLRs is that they're more versitile than any point-and-shoot you can get. If you want to do primarily macro photography, you can get 3-4 different focal length lenses for different situations. If you want to do telephoto work, same deal, you can get a few different lenses to meet your needs. With point-and-shoots, you're stuck with the one lens it comes it.

I wanted a 10MP camera, and basically what sold me on the Pentax was the in-camera image stabilization (which will come in handy for both macro and telephoto work; non-IS cameras have lenses that are IS, but they cost more), the weather-resistent sealing (very important for me since I'll be in the field a lot), and the memory card type (my Panasonic uses a SD, and I've got several gigs worth of cards for that, so if I can avoid it, I'd rather not have to get a new card format). The drawback to the Pentax is that it doesn't have as wide variety of lenses as Canon or Nikon, but that said, I don't feel that I'll really need more than 6 lenses, max. It's also nice in that any Pentax lens will work on it. Other 10MP cameras don't do that.

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