No, the 50D isn’t even out yet so I’ve not rented it nor will I. I’ve only rented the XSi which I loved but then when I bought one the image quality and auto focus wasn’t too good.

For me, the 30D and 5D are sweet spots for the sensor, I just want all the nice new ergonomic features on cameras with lower resolution.

Right now my 10 Megapixel Sensor will fetch 28.9 MB files in uncompressed format. 15 MP will easily do 54MB or something close to that, thereby reducing the need to use interpolation software that introduce interpolation artifacts into the images.

What i’m concerned though is the lack of input canon seems to be taking from its customers. For example, canon is stupid enough to do the following things that nikon does not or other vendors like sigma, tokina or tamron dont do.

1. The Direct Print button, have you ever in your life shot something and printed a large picture of it right to your printer, wireless? I mean, that button could be a mirror lock button, which has real usage. I spend 15 minutes on an image staring at it and deciding what i want to do with it before i upload to flickr, printing is another story altogether.

2. Lens caps dont have centre press type buttons so that you can remove and replace lens caps when you have your lens hood on. Cheap lens makers like tamron and sigma have this. Canon thinks too smart of itself to not make such trivial changes that would help make my life so easy using their lenses with hood.

3. Auto-Update feature for Canon DPP software in windows. We windows users are so used to this, any good software has this. DPP has updates you need to download and install. Suppose you have version 2.0 disk with you and 2.5 is released and then 3.0. You gotta install 2.0 from your CD, download 2.5 update (hopefully if its not removed by then from the canon site) and then the 3.0 update. It all seems stupid to me. I would at least expect to download the entire 3.0 full blown installable version off the site but i’ve never seemed to find it. My new 400D body (2nd one) came with a newer version of the software and thats how i got the newer full version.

4. Usable ISO on low end prosumer DSLR bodies are crap. On my 400D the real usable ISO is 400. 800 and 1600 are utter rubbish. Nikon handles this so well. I tried the D80 camera and it renders so much noiseless images at ISO800 compared to the canon counterpart.

There are many more but most of them are trivial and i don’t know how to use some, like for example, unavailability of spot metering in the 400D which even small point and shoots have these days.

I do however love the line-up of lenses Canon has and this probably will be the reason why i love shooting canon. At this rate though, if canon does not really do away with problems like this, i guess i might as well upgrade to full frame by changing over to Nikon. I really hope, the 5D replacement which i’m eagerly awaiting to buy has none or at least lesser of some of these problems. I guess the high ISO is probably dealt with but i don’t know what the real usable ISO is.

I assume you rented the 50D? How good is the Usable ISO on it? The new 5D replacement may very well sport the same ISO range.

How many prints have you made that required 15 megapixels? Have you ever made a print bigger than 16×24 inches? The extra resolution, while useful theoretically isn’t all that useful to me in actuality. I’m quite happy with where things are right now. What I’d like is better high ISO handling and even better color dynamics of the current sensor, not those things on top of a huge increase in resolution.

That’s just me, others will want the resolution but for what?

Days will not be far away when SSD disks are going to be common and data transfer rates pitch up to 6.0Gb/s. Infact, we can expect those in 1 year with the SATA 3 and USB 3.0 spec that is under beta.