I sold my beloved Nikon D70 use after four years. I miss them. I bought myself a D40, but it never felt right. The image quality was good, better than the D70, but I had to go through the menus to do most everything go to format (change white balance, ISO, the map name you are), while the D70 had dedicated buttons. That makes the difference in ease of use. In addition, the D40 is not even autofocus with my beloved 50mm 1.8 lens. Are you kidding me? I went to use the D40 after 3 days.

I was with the D80, 40D lookind, the D300, the XTI, and this one. All good cameras (at the end of the day, all of them) to excellent images. it \ 's the usability / sweet price / new features factor that counts. 40D and D300 are not for me (expensive pro). The XTI is getting old (though still good) and very good price. The D80 is very good, a bigger brother of my beloved d70, but still old: no sensor cleaning, to highlight tone priority, not with a bundled VR lens ship. You are basically buying a 2006 camera in 2008. I did not like that.

I have this XSI at Circuit City. It felt right in my small hands. He had most of the buttons I need to make changes quickly. I still have to go a menu to set my custom white balance (the D70 had a button for that). The same to the card format (combination of keys on the D70). Auto ISO is not as smart as Nikon \ 's implementation. Other than that, the camera is very good. All other buttons are there. It is an RGB histogram (very important, they can see you when you are clipping individual colors). The picture quality is great. Very little noise (Canon \ 's CMOS sensor) is cleaner than Nikon \' s take on the CCD-D80), very pleasing skin tones (I many photos of my daughter and wife.

If the D80 had the same 2008 features as this (Highlight tone priority, self-cleaning sensor, VR lens) file, I would have gotten that one. It \ 's still a great camera. This is only a 2008-camera with features found in the semi-pro 40D and the pro 1DS.

I \ 'm very happy with it.