Originally posted by UncleVanya Let me play devil's advocate. Why a DSLR and not an integrated lens camera or a bridge camera? These offer a fixed lens that can be a single focal length or a zoom with a small footprint and high image quality. They are smaller, lighter, and often not much less expensive than DSLR's but they lack interchangeable lenses. They often lack an optical viewfinder relying either on Electronic Viewfinders or the back LCD.
I love my K50 and my 18-135 - and I'm not trying to tell you it is a bad idea. I do however want to understand if you have jumped a step or two ahead. Will the K50 sit at home because it is too big and heavy compared to the P&S it replaced, will the lens stay affixed and never be changed?
Don't get me wrong I would love to draw you into the Pentax fold, but I'm not going to blindly recommend it without understanding more.
I wanted to play the devil's advocate too! No doubt about it, bang for buck, the K50 is worth it (I don't have one, but feature-wise, you can't get much better for the price.) If you get tired of the kit 18-55mm len, you can experiment with manual focus lenses. A cheap way to get into different focal lengths and different apertures. And there are features of Pentax and K50 to make use manual focus lenses (no question about whether it will mount or not, and you can focus with focus peaking).
There was a a statistic somewhere not long ago that a lot of people [mostly Canon users(?)] don't progress beyond the kit lens, based on camera to lens sales numbers. The important thing I like to ask people is, are you willing to lug it around? I've many a friends who stop carrying around their dslrs because it's too big. For this reason, I like to ask people to consider the Ricoh GR or something similar as well. It's a tough price tag, considering that a dslr body and lens can cost less, but if it's something you'd use more often, it might be worth it to you. There's also no upgrade path per se either, unless you just replace the whole thing.
Otherwise, I'd see if I can factor in a 35mm f/2.4 into your costs. Everyone else is being nice, but I have the first gen 18-55mm and I never ever use it anymore. The newer generation ones and the WR are suppose to be much better, but I've never used them nor seen a side by side comparison. Heck, I dislike mine so much that if you find a k50 body only or a kit with only the 50-200mm, I'd send you mine. (It's not
that terrible, I just never use it.)