Sorry, forgot to mention which brand earlier.
We went with a Nikon D5100 instead.
Many many thanks for all of your advice - they were really helpful for us both. Indeed, I decided to let my hubby know in advance so he could make an informed choice of his own. Actually, "informed", my foot la. He was equally clueless, probably more so in fact.
Following your recommendations, we skipped places like Gain City and went to camera specialist shops instead. We visited 2 shops at Funan.
At the first shop on the 2nd floor (er ... not very nice to mention names I guess), we encountered a Canon Nazi, who completely brushed off Sony when I mentioned it. He was so sure and boy, was he dismissive of Sony as a brand. He probably didn't mean to but it made me feel a bit like an idiot for even mentioning the brand. In hindsight maybe they don't carry Sony products there. Anyway so it came down to just Nikon and Canon, and between those two he strongly recommended Canon. He said that the most important thing about Canon, since I said that we are not planning to go serious into photography and know squat about DSLR yada yada, is that it is waaaaaaaaaay more user (read: newbie) friendly than Nikon. Said that Nikon requires some amount of knowledge and xyz ... plus Nikon has no free classes included. He actually didn't say very much but was going for Canon throughout our conversation. PERHAPS that's because his cash price (not sure if GST is included) was SGD990+ for Nikon kit set, vs Canon kit set at SGD1060.
Thankfully we left for another shop at the 4th floor. EXCELLENT EXCELLENT customer service. Great salesmanship and very professional. He didn't brush off Sony at all which was nice. Since we have decided to drop Sony by then, he gave a very fair assessment of the other two, and got us both the kit sets so we could handle each for ourselves.
We chose Nikon chiefly because
1. Hubby says it feels better on his hands as there is a steeper depression on the part where your 3 fingers grip the camera. Makes no diff to me though since I have tiny hands and the canon's slight depression is enough for me.
2. We were told that CANON has much richer colours (as if auto-enhanced via photo editing software) which is a winning factor who those into landscape and portraits, compared to Nikon which feature a more warm (which I read as "natural) colours. He said that it might appear dull to regular canon users. However, because Nikon is more natural, the fine details comes up better. Hubby figured this is a plus for Nikon since he wants details and if we want richer colours we can always have the option to doing some photo-editing.
Actually I thought that the Canon set looks a teensy bit better. Then again, both looked rather rubbery to me. Why can't they produce them in at least one more colour??! [ edited: ooooh just read in the earlier post that Pentax has multiple colour options. How cool is that?!]
His pricing is steeper, but then perhaps that's cos we didn't clarify if the first shop quoted us with or without GST. Nikon for SGD1020 whilst his Canon at SGD1059.
We ended up paying SGD1100 with a couple more extras. Thank goodness that he took the initiative to share with us about filters and took the trouble to actually demonstrate to us so we could see the difference for ourselves. We bought a polarised (sp?) for day time use so hubby could finally, take decent pictures of his ridiculously expensive goldfish collecton in our fish pond. This made him really really happy. [Seriously, why would anyone spend a ton on goldfish???!!! Not like you can take these things out for a walk or even pat them right? ... aiyo]. We also bought a normal cheapo $6 filter for night time use (since the polarised one is for daytime) and a "body wrap" for the camera.
We will likely register for Nikon's beginner's class at $20 each.
And here it goes ... the beginning of an adventure!
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
** speaking of which, hubby thought I was insane when I told him that I might still wrap up the empty box and make him go through the ritual of unwrapping the "present" on christmas day, like what our daughter will be doing. And that I haven't forgotten about him sweeping me off my feet too!
of course, most newbies shoot JPEG direct and never realise that there's actually a lot more they can do with their pix if they explore RAW. 
Then bring your anti-virus along (aka. Wife ver 1.0) loh. That way, you are fully protected from all type of BBB virus.
