I ordered the 20D kit from Dell on Sept 18 and received it on Sept 24 (the expected ship date was the 29th) and paid $1555 including 2 day shipping. I ordered two 512mb Lexar 40x cards from Tigerdirect.com with a PC Card adapter for $135 (I'll get a $20 rebate too). And finally, I ordered an 1800mAh BP-511 aftermarket backup battery from Ebay (seller: resurs2) with a mini-tripod for about $20 shipped. I bought eight Rayovac 1800mAh batteries at Walmart for $14 to use in my 380EX.
My previous camera was the ElanIIe and BP-50 with 28-105/3.5-4.5USM, 20/2.8USM, and 100-300/4.5-5.6USM, 380EX. I used 1500mAh NiMH batteries in the BP-50 and 380EX. My first impression: wow, it's fast! 5fps is noticeably faster than the ElanIIe's ~2.5fps. The 18-55 lens doesn't thrill me, but I figure it's not too much worse than the 6 year old 28-105. I miss not having my wide angle 20/2.8. I loved the perspective skewing you could do with that lens on a 1x 35mm camera. However, the 1.6x of the 20D does make the 100-300 plenty... almost too much... for telephoto work. I hope the smaller CCD area is small enough to not get into the lesser quality/vignetted areas that the 100-300 always showed at 300 and wide open. I'll do some testing and see. So far, I've just shot at ISO400 and small/normal, and the pictures are as good as any digital camera I've ever used (nothing over 4mp). With the small/normal setting, I was getting file sizes in the 300-500kb range (a little less than Canon's 600kb number, which I assume is a max size). I'd really like to get the BG-E2 grip for the vertical grip features since I'll be shooting a lot of verticals soon. But there is no financial advantage to using the grip as was the ElanIIe's grip where you could use AA batteries instead of 2CR5's. The BP-50 paid for itself many times over because of that. I never used eye control focus on my ElanIIe because it was too slow for true action. Back when the Eos 3 came out, I remember it being a lot faster at ECF than the ElanIIe, so if when and if ECF comes out on a digital body, I would hope that it's good enough to make the pros happy. But for the 20D, I don't miss it. If anyone has any questions, just let me know. Within the next month, I suspect I'll be snapping off near 6000 frames, so I'll let everyone know how the battery usage is (I plan to turn the 2 second preview to off for that). Brian -- http://www.angelfire.com/ms/brianberryhill MS Region SCCA: http://www.msscca.org * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
