New Canon DSLR

If I'm lucky I'll get the new setup in the water in March before it's obsolete in April.

I hope you are kidding on that statement...nothing "obsoletes" the 350D, 400D, 20D, 30D, 40D, or 5D at this point. If you are buying into the Canon's "its new, it must be better" then good for you, you got sucked in just like Canon hopes you will. I have yet to see any major advancement that would cause the owner of any of these recent model Canon's to consider them obsolete.

I'm rather disappointed in Canon (and Nikon) with these new cameras. What about most of these "advancements" makes for better pictures? Do they take better high IOS images with less noise? No, not really. Does the bigger LCD make it a better camera? No, we shot for a long time without an LCD at all. The only possible advancement is the higher bit count in the saved file, but if the imager doesn't really detect the level of dynamic range it allows for its just a marketing number.

Sure, the most recent cameras have slightly increased dynamic range...and implement methods of removing/dealing with dust, but for the most part they offer no improvements. I find it rather disappointing that we have all of these newer increased megapixel cameras that really do nothing to give us a better tool for capturing images.

Give me a 10MP camera that can shoot a clean image at ISO3200 with improved dynamic range. Who cares if you can instead of 20MP that barely has a usable ISO400? The P&S market is extremely disappointing to me, it seems most of these new cameras have a hard time matching my first digital P&S, the Kodak DC290 circa 1999. I have prints out of this nearly 10-year old beast that most p&s cameras don't seem to match even if it was only 2.1MP.

The megapixel is the "horsepower" of the camera industry and does little to help you with why you buy a camera, just as horsepower us a purposeless marketing term that American's fall victim to. Give me less noise. Give me more dynamic range. Give me faster frame rates. Give me better AF.

I suppose this is the risk of going digital. You are stuck with the same brand of film every time, the one your camera body manufacturer decides they want you to have and puts into their imager and processing engine.

Amen brother.

I hope you are kidding on that statement...

Steve

So, will the 40D have a successor now to add some differentiation between it and the new DSLR just announced?

Still one big difference between the 40D and 450D:

40D is 6.5 fps with a buffer of 17 RAW images

450D is only 3.5 fps with a buffer of 6 RAW images

Not much used underwater, but awesome for sports and wildlife.