The Pentax K100D is Pentax’s entry-level digital SLR, and is one of the cheapest and most feature-packed SLRs on the market. As with the Rebel XT, don’t be intimidated by the complexity of the K100D’s manual controls - it can be operated just as easily as any point and shoot camera in automatic mode.

Being an SLR, unlike other cameras the K100D can be equipped with a large variety of lenses that provide a variety of focal lengths, along with other features. The standard “kit lens” is an 18-55mm lens, which equates to a 27-83mm (3x) zoom range. Since we’re looking for a more versatile range for travel and need a long telephoto range for portraits and sports/action, a better option would be to purchase the body by itself, and buy a $350 Tamron 18-200mm lens separately. This setup provides a 27-300mm (11x) zoom range, which will cover nearly every situation you might encounter on travel, and will be long enough to zoom in for portraits or close-up of sports and fast action.

For low-light situations, the Pentax K100D employs a sensor-shift image stabilization method to reduce blur, and in addition has very good high ISO performance that is perfectly usable even at the highest setting. As a result, the K100D easily handles motion blur that plagues photos of children and pets, and camera shake in low-light static scenes encountered in travel. The K100D also excels at freezing fact-action motion in daylight, and does fairly well in low-light too, although not quite as good as the Rebel XT.

The Pentax K100D can shoot continuously at 2.8 frames per second (about average), but can only take up to 5 photos at a time, meaning you get less than 2 seconds of continuous action. This is a bit of a drawback - with only 5 photos at a time you won’t be able to machine-gun photos off, but sports photos certainly don’t require continuous shooting. Though Pentax cameras aren’t usually regarded as good sports cameras because of a lack of fast-focusing lenses, at this price range (with cheaper consumer lenses), the K100D has one of the most reliable and accurate autofocus systems, similar to that found on the higher-end sports cameras from Canon or Nikon.

The Pentax K100D uses four standard AA batteries (you’ll of course want to get rechargeable AA batteries of your own), which last for 300 shots per charge (CIPA standard) - slightly below average and good enough to last a day or more for most travelers, but perhaps not enough for a full sports game, depending on the length and how many photos you take.