For what its worth DG....

I think you are right to stick with the reasonably "lower" end of the camera range.

Like you, also not knowing too much about photography, we lashed out and bought a Canon EOS-60D DSLR with a 50mm lens for closeup work a couple of years back.

Since putting it to use for pics on ebay and our website we have found that to get decent useable quality images at a size that does not overload your broadbband upload and times we have to back off the resolution levels of the camera to about 50% of what it is capable of.

So this just tells us that the approx $750 we spent on it was too much and we could have gone for a lesser model.

No doubting its a very good camera and does the job handsomely, but we clearly did not need to spend that much money.