I have finally bought a digital SLR, the Sony Alpha 100. It was a tough decision between the Sony and the Nikon D80, but I finally settled on the Sony because it is somewhat cheaper and has image stabilisation built into the body. The Nikon has image stabilised lenses, but that increases the price of every lens.
The weather here is overcast, so I haven’t taken many photos yet. The first experiments in our garden showed good results, particularly this photo of a spider, taken with the zoom at 280mm, hand-held at 1/20th second! The image stabilisation works very well.