[rbarry]

Hi Chris,

As Ian P wrote, get out and handle the goods before you commit to buy. There are no "bad" DSLR cameras, but there is a huge diversity of choice to suit your requirements and budget. The market leaders are Canon and Nikon. You will find the advice you receive will be influenced by brand loyalty (no offence Matt), which is inevitable as no one purchases a camera they don't want!

Perhaps as important to consider is the question of lenses and accessories that are compatible with your brand choice. Once you decide on the manufacturer of your Camera body, all other decisions of brand compatibility have been made for you: you can't easily fit a Nikon lens on a Canon body without a loss in convenience and expense. There are many third party manufacturers of lenses and accessories but the same rules apply: you can't fit a Sigma lens designed to suit a Canon camera on a Nikon body.

You are just starting out with your first purchase of a DSLR and probably won't have any lenses or accessories of any brand yet, so what difference does it make what brand of camera you choose now? The answer is that you will start buying different lenses and photographic paraphenalia to help you expand your skill, and diversify your photographic subject material.
Bear in mind that your Camera body will be the most likely upgrade you make when replacing your stock of photographic equipment. Unless you change all your stock of lenses and accessories, you will have to stick with the same brand of camera when you come to upgrade. For this reason I would suggest you invest in a camera brand that produces a large range of bodies that will give you more choice when upgrading, and that inevitably has to be Nikon or Canon.

I hope you can't tell which one of the three cameras you listed in your original posting I own, but I can thoroughly recommend it!

Rick