50d vs-???

Hi every one,

I'm new to cic, I'm new to the photography world. I started out on a "kodak"8mp point and shoot. I got lucky and took some pretty good shoots and caught the bug. I noticed right a way that I couldn't crop or blow up my pictures as much as I wanted. So I up graded to a 30D, after doing my research on which brand to go with.

Of course the 30D had the same megapixel as my Kodak, how ever I was told it wasn't the same, still not sure how that works exactly. Anyway if I had waited another 2 months the 40D would have been out, but I was happy with the 30D. It was a great learning step.

I like shooting landscapes and architecture, with a little of my grand kids sporting events and other family events. When the 50D came out I desided to upgrade. I had read the review from dpreview.com and thought it was a good choice. I like the camera a lot, but I noticed the pictures I was taking with my newly acquired EF-S 18-55 was a little fuzy. the camera came w/a "EF 28-135mm IS, and I bought a EF 70-300mm IS from Amazon and they both do a pretty good job.

I did some more research, and read some more reviews and found out that the 50D had to have a lot better glass than I had. I wish dpreview had said that in the review, it may have made a differance in my decision, mayby not.

Any ways here I am, and heres my question, am i better off up-grading to a 5D, a 5d mkll, or down grade to a 40D. the 40D is a 10 mp, the 5D is a 12 mp. the lens i have would work w/both of those(except the 18-55)no real loss there. the 5D mk ll might have the same problems since its a 21 mp. Or should I spend my money on better lenses. I know the EF-S 10-22, and the EF-S 17-55 are both suppost to be great lenses, but by the time I spend that much I could have all most paid for a new camera. So hard to deside. any help will realy be appreciated. Thanks, Ed

Hi Ed,

Welcome to Cambridge in Colour - it's great to have you with us.

It sounds to me like you may have had some poor advice in the past - hopefully we can help put that right here though.

The first thing I'd like to comment on is camera megapixels ...

We all know that a picture is a 2 dimensional thing - and that has a big influence on how effective having more megapixels really is. Let's say you have a camera with 8MP - and you want to have a camera with double the resolution you have now. At first thought you might think that one with 16MP would do the trick - but - because you need to double both the number of dots across and the number of dots down an image you need to QUADRUPLE the number of pixels (ie you'd need a 32MP camera).

To put that another way, in terms of "how big can you print", the difference between an 8MP camera and a 10MP camera (or even a 12MP camera) is approx "nothing".

The other thing to keep in mind is "as the size of a print increases, so does the viewing distance" - and as we know, the further we are away from something, the less detail our eyes can resolve. I have canvas prints hanging on my wall 44 inches wide and 22 inches high that were shot with an 8MP 20D and I have other canvas prints along side them that were shot with a 21MP Canon 1Ds3 and - at normal viewing distances - you can't tell them apart. In fact even up close it's a struggle to see any significant difference.

So in my opinion, the megapizel war (for all intents and purposes) should have been called a draw once they hit 8MP. In all fairness I should probably mention that the biggest advantage of having lots of pixels is that you can get more agressive with cropping, and still have a useful image - but that's the only reason I can think of.

In terms of image quality, if would be really helpful if you could create yourself a gallery here, and upload some sample images so that we can get a better idea of what's going wrong for you. If image quality ("IQ") is all that matters, I can tell you that a 30D will be just fine. A 5D is just a full frame version of your old 30D, and the 5D2 - nice camera as it is - probably isn't going to give you any better looking prints.

In your case I'd be taking a look at 3 key areas that may be causing a lack of sharpness:

- the shutterspeeds that you're using (in conjunction with the focal length) to see if you're getting camera shake,

- the lenses ("glass") that you're using, and

- what you're doing in post-processing in terms of sharpening and the like.

The glass that you're using isn't professional quality, but, are still capable of taking a shot that will make a very nice print - so probably best that we start with the first and last things, and then once we're confident that we've got those sorted, we can take a closer look at lenses.

Sound like a plan?