Gonch got me thinking again about photography with his post on wanting to upgrade to the just announced new entry level Canon DSLR. With a project coming up where I'll take lots of pictures, naturally I was thinking about it anyway. Also, with a trip to Italy coming tentatively in the fall, I'm not going to fuck around with anything less than the best possible quality photos.
PMA, the photo show going on right now, failed to produce the replacement for the 5D (generally referred to as the 5D Mark II), but the 5D has been dropping in price. It's down a couple hundred dollars from a few months ago. The benefit of the 5D is that it has a full-size 35mm sensor. That means that it "sees" all of what my lenses see and it will perform better in lower light. The rumors generally say it will go from 12.8 megapixels to around 16, which frankly doesn't make a difference unless you're shooting for billboards, and it will use the newer Digic III processor.
The other photo lust I have is for the 24-105mm f/4 IS lens. That ain't cheap either (though Amazon sells it with the 5D body for $2,750 right now, which is around $300 less than the last time I looked). That's a great general use lens, and the image stabilization is gold. I do miss "real" wide angles (my camera, the 10D has a smaller than 35mm sensor, so it crops what the lens sees), and 24mm would be amazing.
An inexpensive addition to my photo gear would be a 50mm f/1.4 lens, as you can do stunning short depth of field, with all the sharpness associated with prime lenses. They're awesome for portrait photography. I think Tyler could do some serious damage with one of those.
I still haven't tried Aperture, even though a lot of people swear by it, and there is a trial version from Apple. It seems a lot better for organizing and doing batch processing than Photoshop and Bridge (a workflow that's still a little weird to me). I gotta try it soon.
So I don't know that I'm going to pull the trigger on any of these any time soon, but God only knows what will happen if my accountant calls back this week with a really good tax refund number. The fact that I have a video camera that almost set me back five figures but skimp on the still photo camera is pretty weird.
Yeah, you know I seriously was thinking about the 5D for a while. Then the 40D for a while. Mostly because those are closer to the kind of camera you're 'supposed' to have if you're a photographer.
As much as it'd be cool to buy a 'real' camera, my logic circuits just take over and tell me I don't need to. I've been fine with the Rebel.
Unless you're doing some really specialized stuff (and I'm not) - I don't believe you're getting much better photos from that 5D than you are from the XSi - assuming the same lenses. I'd be more inclined to put nice lenses on a Rebel than spend the money on more camera.