The Search for the Perfect DSLR

I've always taken an interest in photography because I love to take pictures of places I've been to and freeze moments in frames so I can look at them every now and then. I share this interest with Blow who believes that he has an artistic eye and dreams to be a professional photographer one day. Thus the search for the perfect camera began. These were the decision points that we went through: 1. Point and shoot or DSLR? Since Blow wanted to be a pro we opted for the DSLR. 2. Canon or Nikon? We spent several months debating this one.We asked friends and lurked on photography forum, even posted a survey. At first we chose Canon because most of our friends use it but we ended up choosing Nikon because of it's attribute that I wouldn't enumerate here :) 3. Brand New or Used? After meeting up with sellers of used cameras, we decided that it was much safer to buy a brand new camera with the warranty and all because you can't be assured with a used camera how it was actually handled by the previous user unless if you personally know the person. 3.What Model? If we spent months just debating over the brand can you imagine the time we spent choosing the specific model? Surprisingly we just spent over a week because of budget constraints. Our dream camera was a D80 because it is a semi-pro camera plus all it's fancy features which we also searched over the net and learned from friends but the stores are no longer selling it, I even called up Henry's at Hidalgo and contacted supppliers from different areas(Cebu, CDO and etc). The next choice was a D90 but we can't simply afford it. We can use the credit card but we don't want to be burdened with debt over the next few months plus we have to buy lenses and other stuffs. In the end we ended up buying an entry level camera which is a phase out model, Nikon D40. We almost bought D60 and D3000 but again after serious thinking we chose D40 among them. We thought that we would just have to invest in the lenses. Whew! I'm glad that part was over. Now we're moving on to actually taking pictures and we have so much to learn.We have no fancy notions that simply owning a DSLR would make us photographers, owning a DSLR is sooo common nowadays. We just want to be true to what we truly love to do...documenting life...as we see it.