For those interested in moving up to a digital SLR without making too deep a dent in the wallet, the Pentax K2000 is a very appealing choice. Priced at $599.99 including a lens and an external flash unit, the 10.2-megapixel K2000 is a solidly built camera that feels small but substantial in your hands. It’s easy enough to take out of the box and start shooting right away, even if your only prior photographic experience was with a point-and-shoot. When you’re ready for a little more control, there’s a wide variety of scene modes that tailor camera settings to the situation at hand without making detailed setting changes manually. You also get a generous assortment of digital filters for experimenting with unusual effects. And if you start feeling more ambitious about fine-tuning your shooting, the K2000 offers a sophisticated range of controls and customization options. Most important of all, of course, is picture quality, and in both our lab testing and in-the-field shooting, the camera consistently produced very respectable results.

The Pentax K2000 is small and very portable, weighing in at just a little over a pound with the included 18-55mm lens attached, but it doesn’t have the insubstantial, toy-like feel we’ve experienced with some compact SLRs. The grip is better suited to someone with small hands, but this large-pawed reviewer  still managed the camera easily, in part due to the rubberized surface of the grip (other inexpensive SLRs resort to textured plastic) and well-positioned controls.

The LCD is a modest 2.7-inch display with 230,000-dot resolution, adequate but not exciting. We do like the control panel that shows up on that screen while shooting, though. The LCD displays all the major settings when the camera’s in record mode. Press the OK button and this screen turns into an interactive control panel, allowing you to move the cursor to the setting you’d like to change and make quick adjustments. The standard menu display is less to our liking, with a slightly confusing organization and unattractive presentation.

What’s missing from the K2000 is Live View, the increasingly popular feature that lets you compose your photo on the LCD screen instead of the traditional SLR shooting style, peering through an optical viewfinder. We don’t consider this a major loss. In our testing, most Live View systems focus too slowly to be practical for photographing moving subjects. When shooting a still subject with the camera mounted on a tripod, it’s a great convenience. Taking photos of your family at a party or kids playing in the yard, not so much.

Pentax, like Sony and Olympus, builds an image stabilization system for minimizing the blur caused by shaky hands right into the camera, where Canon and Nikon include image stabilization in individual lenses. With the Pentax, any lens you mount on the camera, from wide-angles to telephotos and regardless of price, benefits from image stabilization technology.

An unusual component in the Pentax K2000 kit is the included AF200FG external flash (there’s a built-in pop-up flash too. The AF200FG lists at $150 and can be found selling for around $90, but it’s not quite as much of a bargain as it sounds, since the flash head doesn’t swivel or tilt. Yes, you get much brighter light output, but you can’t bounce the flash off the ceiling or walls to soften shadows, and that’s the biggest reason to use an external flash in the first place.

Another unusual feature of the Pentax K2000 is the power source. Nearly all current digital SLRs come with rechargeable batteries, while the K2000 uses AA batteries. We have no problem with that – we shot with an inexpensive set of nickel metal hydride rechargeables that held on for hundreds of shots. And if your battery does run out of juice while traveling, it’s a lot easier buying AAs at the closest drugstore than plugging in a charger and waiting.

Performance (read in-depth lab performance coverage at DigitalCameraInfo.com)
Overall we were very pleased with the results of our lab testing. The K2000 may have a relatively modest number of megapixels, but the actual photos we analyzed were very sharp. Image noise, those distracting speckles you notice mostly in solid-color areas of photos, is kept under control nicely by the K2000, and the camera’s very respectable dynamic range performance means it can hold onto detail in both shadowed areas and bright parts of your photos. We were less impressed with the K2000’s ability to reproduce colors precisely, but for most consumers color accuracy is less important than attractiveness, and we had no problems on that score. The camera is slower than others when it comes to rapid-fire sequential shooting, and the autofocus system is accurate but a bit slow, so this isn’t the ideal rig for serious sports photography. For most situations, though, the K2000 at least meets and sometimes exceeds our expectations for a camera in this price class.

Comparisons (read in-depth comparisons at DigitalCameraInfo.com)
We weighed the pros and cons of the Pentax K2000 against several pricier SLRs and, while it didn’t blow any of them out of the water, it held its own in several key areas. For example, in our resolution testing, the Pentax outscored the Canon 50D, which sells for $1399 for the body alone. The $600 Pentax did as well in our image noise testing as the 50D as well, and outshone the $1299 Olympus E-30 in several areas. Of course, these other cameras have features the Pentax lacks, including higher megapixel count, even sturdier construction and superior LCD displays with Live View functionality. When you get down to how good your  picture look on screen or in your hand, though, higher price doesn’t necessarily buy you a better result.

The two closest competitors in our comparison group are the Pentax K2000 and the Canon Rebel XS, both of which retail for $599.99 with lens. In the Canon’s favor are superior color accuracy and long exposure results, plus Live View mode and access to the huge selection of Canon lenses. On the Pentax side we find superior image resolution and white balance results, a significantly better-built body, in-camera image stabilization and the included external flash unit. We’d advise a hands-on experience with both when shopping for an inexpensive SLR, since both of these cameras offer very good performance at very aggressive prices.