new xti first impressions

[gary]

this seems to be a real nice camera, maybe exceptional value for the money, now i've only had it in my hands for 48 hrs, but i'm impressed so far
interesting situation canon has put themselves in, i was going to upgrade from 20d in the fall, but unless the rumored 40d has some can't live without, knock my socks off features, i'll be waiting untill full frame upgrade to 5d shows up and full frame price drops
i can easily see myself in the future with a ff with an arsenal of primes and L grades, as my main shooting set up, esp when traveling down the road in the camper, and the xti as the backup and the fly away trip camera with a full range of ef-s lenses, i've already got 2, the 10-22 and the 17-55 f2.8 IS, maybe they will listen to the masses cry and come out with a 35 mm f1.4 ef-s with low distortion and low ca
i'll post some images when i find something worthy of shooting, otherwise you'll have to settle for dog and cat shots
love the lightweight and no problems so far with the size relative to my hands
gary

 

[vantonni]

i would also mention that the 400d(xti) has a sensor cleaning mode that older DSLRs don't have and i think it really works. i hated getting a nice photo on my 20d only to see little smudges. my xti has a lot less of that. also the new picture modes is a nice advance over the preset 1, preset 2 of the 20d the more options to tweek the better (though I don't touch too much)

with the kit lens I found the 400d to be soft, even at f/8. in googhle's picassa I sent everything through two rounds of sharpening and then everything was cool. a better lens and some tweeking of the setting would produce a sharper image but i still think it might be a bit soft out of the box (17,000 photos -mostly paper documents and archives - in jpeg mode)