Although I use a Nikon digital SLR, I am finding I am using it in exactly the same way as I used to use my film SLR, a Pentax MX, hardly if anything of the built in programming, so to all intents are purposes, my camera is the same as I was used to but in a digital media. Now I have been doing photography for a good thirty years in fact, hang on, age 6 I got hold of a box brownie, so 36 years and have tried most mediums and size of film except the plate cameras and even at one time held an LRPS in photography I in the past used to run a camera club and a darkroom. But now I am finding photography is everywhere, the digital medium has made that so and due to the ease of photography now and it's almost instant applications some worrying aspects are coming to light, which I understand is initiating this everyone believes they can become famous attitude, you know the youth and others and such tv programmes set up to capture the attitude. I have just recently written a paper referencing the late Susan Sontag and the new photographic revolution that has caused me to think on how I use photography. I recommend Sontag's writings on the subject, they do make you think
Worth reading;
http://a.parsons.edu/~creanm/narrative/narrative_readings/sontag_torture.pdf
But of cameras one has to ask themselves to what purpose are they going to put the camera, if it is mostly online and computer viewing what do you need the camera for, if one intends to print, what size do you wish to print to, what is most likely, again consider the camera, as I tell you what, lugging a dslr and lenses around is not always fun and it does inhibit oneself quite a bit.
Now a step forward for me in cameras, is what I had in the past, a robust manual slr that has a digital back, I got the old Pentax M series for a reason, they were tiny, I used to carry the MX as my main camera ( no batteries) black and white media and an ME super body ( watch batteries),as my back up, snappy colour media camera, autofocus I had via the use of lenses and the hyperfocal distance method and it was faster than the motorised digital lenses and silent too. At one time I used to carry both camera bodies one in each pocket of my jacket and lenses elsewhere on me, but always to hand and no gadget bag to carry. One thing film always made you think, before depressing that release button, was did you really need that picture, and was it framed right, Now we are living in a world of throw away images and everyone and everything is camera fodder to throw away, or in computer parlance; delete.