>>3238138>As for the Pentax, price is less of an issue than the fact that by your account it lacks important common features.It's less a matter of Pentax lacking features - the camera bodies actually have a TON of features, by the numbers, including totally unnecessary shit like weather-sealing, GPS, a simulated anti-aliasing filter, pixel shift exposure, star tracking, etc. etc.... and it's more a matter of essential functions being categorically inferior on Pentax than on other brands, namely the autofocus tracking, accuracy and speed being several decades behind Canon and Nikon. Pentax's exposure and white balance metering also tend to be less than stellar, IME. High ISO noise performance is more of a technical fault that users who actually care about it will criticize, but it's not going to matter for the majority of your photos.
Pentax's lens roadmap is also full of undesirable lenses - slow primes, variable aperture zooms, some compact lenses to get you hooked on the idea of a compact system and then a dozen lenses bigger than anything else in their catalog for full frame, some weather-sealed lenses to get you hooked on weather-sealing, and then virtually no compact weather-sealed lenses. Finally, there are a ton of outdated lenses designed 20+ years ago, i.e., before digital cameras were modern enough to put new demands on lens optimization.
>>3238138>This looks promising. Is that the top of the range for its time? The 50D was Canon's top hobbyist camera at the time. The current iteration is the 80D. Image quality for most lighting conditions and print sizes is going to be virtually the same. Part of the recommendation has to do with the price range you suggested, though. $250 for the body and maybe $100 for a basic kit lens (you should really buy a nicer lens, though) is pretty affordable. If you have $700 to spend, you could get a top tier camera from 2008, like the Nikon D3 or Canon 5D Mark II, but I don't recommend either as someone's first.
