I want to buy a digital slr camera but I don't want to spend too much. Any recommendations?

Canon 350XT with the kit lens
Nikon D50 with the kit lens.

Both are fantastic, inexpensive SLRs that offer a great upgrade path if you ever want it.

Agree with the above. These are entry level, and yet still great. Personally, prefer the Nikon. Try to get used ones on ebay and remember once you get SLR, camera bodies matter less than lenses. So if you gonna spend, spend on good glass. Have fun.

i bought a digi camera myslef recently and have a lot of knowledge on them due to research and being a tech lover.

the best brands are: sony and canon.
others like pentax, kodak, and minolta are not good for digi photography. Infact minolta and pentax are planning to totally exit the digi cam market along with Fuji. reason is that when digital cameras started entering into the market they thought it would not catch on and so did not invest in the technology. canon was the first to invest and so was sony and they became the leaders in the industry. now with competition so high pentax, minolta, nikon and so on cant cope with it and are loosing profits like anything. so they are opting out. you can research on this as its true. They actually just contract out there production of cameras to manufacturers who use there own technolgoy and just brand the camera for them. so basically these brands are selling only because of there previous brand image that that they enjoy.
It is only sony and canon who conduct there own research and development. keep in mind that kodak has too now started to invest heavily in the digi cam sector!! but it will be a while before they are at the top of the game.

take my advice and buy a sony or canon. Sony will be cheaper than canon by a slight margin but both are equally amazing.
use ebay to buy as you will get it for cheap.
buy 6mp and above and opt for 512 mem card nothing less than that or its a waste of money.
if u need more information i would be happy to help. just emial me with something specific.

I have to agree with the previous posters about the brands.

Consider looking for these cameras on eBay, often professionals upgrade and want to recoup investment from their older cameras.

Also look at the camera makers' WWW site. Many times they get warranty return camera, refurbish them, and resell them for less than full retail. If you don't need the "latest and greatest" model digital SLR, the older refurbished (or eBay) cameras can be quite reasonable.

If you are on a budget, I recommend that you look in to the Pentax DL2.

You can get it with a lens for about $550. I own a Pentax DS and highly recommend the Pentax DSLR's. They are compact, lightweight and have best-in-class viewfinders. You can get great used lenses off of eBay. The lenses that Pentax made for their manual focus cameras over 20 years ago still work well on the DL2.

I used to own and use a Canon system but switched to Pentax. Canon has a superior selection of high-end lenses so if you think any of those may be in your future, stick with Canon.