well, if we are talking about cheap and good lenses or bodys, we should clarify what the quality issues look like on the pictures.
My camera is a 2 year old Pentax K20D (maybe comparable to EOS 500D and Nikon D90), and this picture was done with the very cheap and ugly standard kit lense 18-55mm freehand without tripod. Flashlight was body integrated with minimum intensity setting:
More experienced photographers here might see the quality issue as I do as well, but it is a nice picture anyways. Good enough for me, to order a poster-sized print for my living room. - What about the quality issue of the lense: well, on this picture you see the chromatic abberation at the leafs above the Lemurs head.
Same thing at the next picture. The Sifaka and the tree is fine, the branches in the back show chromatic abberations in blue. - But for me and my private use its still great. This was shot with a cheap Sigma 70-300.
But you see effects like that only in extreme zoom positions: very wide angle or far tele. - But even with this cheap lenses, you can shoot beautyful pictures if you stay in less extreme zoomrange:
at least I cannot see any quality issues here, no dark shadows in the corner, no abberation (standard kit lense and body-flashlight again)
Even if I have a expensive Macro, you can do macros with a cheap tele-zoom also. Even freehand. They dont look as good as macropictures with a real macro-lense, but look at this. Shot freehand with the Sigma 70-300 lense:
Not perfect, but good enough for postersized and showing to others (non-photographers usually dont see these quality issues and find these pictures very nice)
and one last picture to show another ugly quality issue:
this was shot at the east coast of madagascar. Also, noone of my guests did see the quality issue, even if I find it very ugly: You see the corners are darkened. This is caused by the cheap lense and even the best body cannot avoid that. Well, fortunately you can correct that with one click with nearly every good software.
All pictures were shot freehand in madagascar. I didnt want to bring the expensive lenses there... - Even with the best and most expensive body, you would get those quality issues on your pictures if you use cheap lenses like I did, but you would get better pictures with same body and better lenses. So I absolutely agree with those who say: most important is the lense. -- even if cheap lenses might be good enough to start, and still do better pictures than compact cameras.
So what about the body:
if you are new to DSLR, you might want to use automatic motif-programs like "portrait" or "landscape" etc, since you are sometimes in a hurry and not yet good enough to do the perfect settings quick enough. Without automatic programs, you might get frustrated very early and stop using the good DSLR. - More expensive bodys dont have automatic programs and no integrated flashlight (what is good enough and very practicable to brighten shadows on sunny days), while the cheapest don thave the ability to do settings by hand (aperture, shutter time, flashlight intensity etc), so the best for you might be something in between like a EOS 500D or Nikon D90 etc. which can do both.
And remember: even the cheapest body and the cheapest lense do much better pictures than every small compact camera can do. Also because of the bigger chip these cameras are less sensitive to Infrared-noise in hot environments.
So now you can see if a cheaper (not cheapest) setting will do it to start. If some time passed by and you learned to take pictures with DSLR, you might know better what further equipment you might need, like a tripod, a stronger flashlight or better lenses. But to start, settings like this are good enough, in my eyes.
Hope that helped a little. - I posted closeups and tele-pictures since this is probably what you want to do if you shoot chameleons.
(and yes, there was 2 dust-particles on the chip as you probably see
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. I have no info on the 75-300. But it would give you a good intro to portrait and zoom photography, with the option to upgrade to better glass depending on the style of photography you like best.
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