Best camera for indoor sports shots????

[jpz4315]

I am looking for a digital zoom camera under $600 capable of taking basketball action shots inside high school gyms. I have been using a Pentax SLR with a 300mm zoom lens and a fairly powerful flash, but I would like to try digital. Any insight as to what camera I should look at and whether I could get by without an external flash. I have been looking at the panasonic cameras and they seem to be a good fit, but don't know their capabilities in these conditions or the possiblities of adding a flash to these cameras. Any thoughts or advice on these subjects would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Billiam]

The Pana FZ20 has a hot shoe, so it will use an external flash. The lens is fairly fast (f2.8 over the full range), but if you need to use an ISO higher than 100 you may or may not find the image to be noisier than you'd like.

If you like using your SLR, one option might be to wait for the soon-to-be-released Pentax *istDS SLR body, which would accept your current Pentax lenses (with a 1.5x crop factor, so your 300mm would act as a 450mm). See the preview at:

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/pentaxistds/

For fast response and low-light performance, no point'n'shoot is as capable as an SLR.