My son, Philip (aka Tony) was bitten by the photography bug some time ago. He recently purchased a new digital SLR camera. I had no idea what he had purchased, so I asked what he had and how he liked it. This was the return email from Tony.
Dad,
Dad,
As you know, I bought a new camera a few weeks before Colin's wedding. My
old camera was a EOS 20D, my new one is the Canon 40D.
It was a tough decision to buy it. If you go just by megapixels, my 40D
(which debuted in august of '07) has 10, and I knew that Canon was coming out
with a new Rebel XSI camera a month or so later that was going to be 12.
However, the rebel is a slower camera (3.5 frames per second, compared to
my camera's 6.5 fps), and I could have never been able to stand that. I often
will shoot bursts of photographs, and the slower camera would have driven me
crazy. The nice thing about the rebel line is it one of the places where Canon
does experimentation on features they might want to introduce to the higher
level Canons, kind of a "trickle up" way of innovating. The feature that my
camera uses to clean its sensors was originally on the previous Rebel
camera.
But to the other part of your question,..with the Canon cameras at my price
level, I'm not sure I would switch to the 5d. It still costs more than my camera
does, but it is slower. The pie in the sky camera is the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III 21.1MP Digital SLR Camera (21.1
mexapixels!!!!). That camera body costs $7,300 dollars!
It actually is a touch slower than my 40d (about the same speed as my
20d), but it is the professional level camera, and it would be a thrill just to
see what it could do. My understanding of it is limited, but basically I gather
that it is a "smarter" camera. It can figure out trickier light situation more
readily than my camera can (most cameras at my level can take the same kind of
picture, the difference is how easy it is switch from one situation to
another).