When I was shopping to upgrade from my D50, my choices were D5000 and D7000. I just couldn't come up with the price difference, and settled on the D5000. I've had it a little over a year and I just put it on eBay to help pay for upgrading to the D7000.

As far as images produced, there's not going to be a whole lot of difference. 12 megapix to 16 is not as big a difference as it sounds. But the D7000 has a faster shutter and faster frame rate, a larger ISO range, it has in-camera AF fine-tuning, better focus tracking, and while I've not shot video on it yet, it has higher-resolution video (1080 vs 720) and I think autofocus works during video, not just at the start like on the D5000. For a starter it may not seem worth twice the price, so maybe upgrading later would be a good plan.

I am going to miss that swivel screen, though!