vailian

I have been very happy with my main camera, a Canon 20d that I have had for about 3 years. It has been reliable and has stood up to the fearfully rough handling I put it through.
For those of you who are not interested in the tech things, skip this: The 20d is a single lens reflex, big and clunky, with interchangeable lenses. It has an ASA setting that goes up to 1600, meaning that I can get useable pictures even in fairly low light without having to resort to flash.
Its main advantages over the little pocket cameras are these:
I can use good quality telephoto lenses on it...useful for the concert pictures I take where I can't get so close to the stage, and also for taking portraits-- I don't like putting the camera in people's faces.
And (most important) the shutter is instantaneous, so I can capture exactly the moment I want: musicians are always moving around, I need to be able to determine when the shutter opens.
So why did I buy another camera this week? One that looks exactly like the one I have now?
Not easy to answer, but the 20d did have a couple of things that bothered me, one was the very loud shutter noise (disturbing in concerts) and the small display, and a fair amount of grain at the high ASA settings.
My new camera (Canon 40d) has a much quieter shutter, and huge display, and the graininess even at 1600 ASA is minimal. In addition, it has 10 megapixels resolution... I don't actually need the extra pixels, but they are nice to have if I need to crop the photo down. More important is, the picture information per pixel is much more detailed.




To illustrate this, here are two pictures I took last night on my roof garden. One shows the scene as it looked, the other using the extra depth of information I can get from the camera.
Actually it is the same picture file (exposure was around 15 seconds), just with different readouts of the same information. Pretty startling nevertheless!