40D or 50D

Byker28i

Byker28i

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So after weeks of waiting for parts and still not being able to repair it, I'm being given £600 of Jessops vouchers to replace my 40D.

I was very happy with my 40D, thought it was a great camera, but - do I pay a little more and upgrade to the 50D?
 
I'll go for the 50D. To me the microadjustment and better LCD is good.
I only speak for myself though. SOme people might still prefer the 40D as its cheaper.
 
Assuming I don't tell the missus then cost isn't an issue. ;)

There were some early reports of the 50D noise being worse than the 40D? or is that just because it has a higher range.
 
I have a 30D, 40D, 50D and 1D3. The 50D is better than the 40D, but not by much, and whether the areas of improvement are important to you really depends on what you shoot, the ISOs you need and whether or not your glass is long enough to always fill the frame. Major benefits of the 50D are....

- AF microadjustment can reap benefits, and sharper focus will be of value to make those 15MP count.

- If you can keep the ISO to no more than 1600 then the higher pixel density should put more pixels on your subject, which will mean you get to keep more detail in your subect and/or have more cropping opportunity. However, if you're up in the higher ISO ranges and want the detail I'm afraid that NR will probably offset any detail advantage. That said, the 50D can turn in good results at 3200 ISO but the details will be lost.

- The new LCD and high resolution preview image do make it far easier to judge whether your images are sharp, when shooting. It's really hard to judge image sharpness on the 40D and its predecessors, and even on the 1D3 as well.

- If you shoot to JPEG then there are new features like ALO and LPIC that will improve the results SOOC and you also have more control over NR. If you shoot raw then there is nothing new as far as image processing enhancements go.

Here are a couple of examples from my 50D....

With 100-400 lens at 400mm and with a Kenko 1.4X teleconverter. Shot raw and processed in Lightroom....
20081122_112845_1795_LR-3.jpg


100% crop....
20081122_112845_1795_LR-2.jpg


3200 ISO, shot raw and processed in DPP. Resized to 25%....
3329691515_90216691f3_o.jpg


If you don't need the extras on offer by the 50D then the 40D is still a very fine camera and the savings could go a long way towards a flash gun, lens or tripod.
 
Cheers TDod

I'm fairly well sorted for lenses, having a EF-S 10-22, 24-105, 70-200 F4 and 100-400. Flash guns I have a 580 mk2 and a 420 for slaving.

Mostly I shoot sport, rugby, football and motorsport, but also occaisional gig and portrait, odd and sods...

I always shoot raw onto SanDisk Extreme 3 CF cards - mostly 4gb.

There's the 'newer camera is better' factor, but then other things come into thought.

I use lightroom 2 and photoshop CS3 at present. Would I need to upgrade for the 50D (I think lightroom 2 supports 50D).

Are the batteries the same? I have two uprated after market ones and the original from my 40D.
Same remote trigger socket? I have a wireless trigger I use.


Brocks - £75 worth of vouchers gets me some bigger CF cards :D
 
Batteries are the same as are grips and other accessories. Lightroom supports the 50D and CS3 will need an ACR update.

You'll need extra cards as the 5mp causes the cards to fill up rapidly.
 
You have good lenses so they certainly wouldn't be wasted on the 50D, but I'm not seeing anything there that screams out and says the 50D is needed. I guess AF microadjustment would be the most relevent improvement, but only if you have any sort of difficulties with any of your lenses at the moment. Most of my Canon lenses have had a bit of a tweak on my 50D and 1D3, including my L glass.

If you don't mind the extra spend then the 50D certainly won't let you down. The AF is said to have been improved a little over the 40D (according to the white paper) but Canon don't seem to be making a song and dance about that in the marketing so I wouldn't get too excited.

Lightroom 2.3 will handle the 50D files perfectly and is a free upgrade from LR2. I'm not sure about CS3. I think ACR 4.6 might be OK for the 50D, but I don't know for sure. If not, you always have the option to convert to DNG format.

£75 of vouchers won't get you much in the way of CF cards from Jessops :lol:

Batteries are the same between them. My 7dayshop BP511 compatible cheapies work equally well in any of my xxD bodies.
 
Cool - cheers.
I think if I can get it through the financial controller (missus) then the 50D seems the way forward. Extra pixels means I can shoot a little wider to catch the action then crop in PP. Higher ISO performance would help the gig photography
 
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