Your enthusiasm is cool. What you have to do is decide what works best for you. I decided to go with the Olympus E-1s after my last deployment to Iraq and with three months left in the military, I bought my first E-1 body and a couple of lenses. My reasoning for doing so was: A, I like the way the E-1 body with the HLD-2 grip/battery felt in my hands. There's a certain "feel" that goes with each camera you pick up through the years. B, I couldn't be accused of lifting any of my military equipment upon my retirement. You'll come to understand what pixel myth is after you've been in the field for a while. Anybody who tries to tell you that you can't make a "sellable" image with a 5MP camera body isn't working in the field. I've taken images from my military D1X's out to 44"x100", had them custom matted and framed and they look wonderful. Part of my legacy in the military is on display throughout the wing buildings on Grand Forks AFB. Literally hundreds of posters on the walls. Anyway, I've been shooting with Olympus E-1s for about 18 months now and I love the Olympus system. I've recomended the E-500 to a number of people and they like the camera and what they're able to do with it. Is it a professional camera? What is a professional camera? Is it built to take the beating I give a body? No. Will it work for what you propose to do with it? Yes. The best thing that you can do while in college is take advantage of the knowledge and really learn Photoshop and Illustrator. Learn what the Mac or PC will do for you. Let the camera and the computer become an extension of your imagination. Don't limit yourself into thinking that the technology is the cure-all. It's still all about the person behind the shutter release who mentally constructs the image. My old mentor and professor was a retired Navy shooter who always used to tell me that the older he got, the more convinced he became that the camera is nothing more than a light tight box. Get out and shoot, shoot, and shoot some more. That's the best advise I can give you. Pyxel eh? Do you know what a dye-coupler is? Or how the degree of agitation in the color developer will directly impact the overall warmth of a chrome image? No of course you don't, because you don't need to. The technology of today doesn't require you to. But when I was a youngster freshly assigned to the combat documentation unit responsible for the entire European Theater of Operations back in 1982, When we'd shoot 5 gallon buckets full of Ektachrome, I had to learn that to compensate for the cool blue cast prevelent in Ektachrome during the European winters, I'd cut my agitation of my rolls of Ektachrome in the E-6 color developer to increase the warmth in the slides. It was a trade off, I'd lose some detail in my highlight areas, but the imagery and skin tones weren't cold and muddy. The reason for that is because of the overall construction of E-6 based slide film and the 4 emulsion layers in the film. Blue being the lowest layer in the film construction, I discovered through trial and error how to artificially warm the images up. I share this with you because my trainer at the time encouraged me to experiment, to try new things, to learn the technology. Who'd have thought or knew at the time that within 20 years slide films and E-6 would become obsolete? I haven't talked this much or shared this much in a long time since I retired, enough out of me. Good luck and keep shootin'!

Mark