A quick play with the new Canon eos 50D

Had a quick play with Canon's new DSLR today. Just 1 year after the release of the Canon 40D, the 50D has been released. Obviously Canon has been feeling the pinch from Nikon and needed to get something new out to keep up. I wasnt that interested with the announcment of the new 50D as I've had my sights set on the new 5D mark 2 which is due out in November. But had a little play with it today in the local Camera Kitamura and must say I was quite impressed.

The body looks and feels exactly the same as the 40D but the first thing you notice is the greatly improved rear LCD screen. It now looks beautiful! and makes the screen on my 40D look like a peace of poo. All that extra resolution makes it a lot easier to check for perfect focusing when zooming in to check on the screen.

The camera comes in a kit with the new EFs 18~200mm image stabilized lens. When I first heard about this lens it also didn't really jump out at me as anything more than a crappy cheap lens for armatures who couldn't be bothered changing or carting around separate lenses but I was pleasantly surprised. The lens focused very quickly on all my test shots in the store. Even right down to close up focusing at its high native iso of 3200 iso. Going only by the LCD image the 3200 iso image quality was excellent and a very nice improvement over the 40D. The 50D also has of course more mega pixels but anyone who knows anything about cameras knows that this isn't of much importance. Another thing that sounds interesting (but I'm not sure of how much improvement it actually makes) is the now gap less micro lenses in the sensor which apparently make for better image quality. So some very nice improvements on this body coupled with the 18-200mm IS lens make this a sweet bit of kit indeed!!

If I wasn't already saving for the 5D mkII the 50D would defiantly be my next weapon of choice for sure!