350XT
I'll begin with the 350XT. The first wedding I did was with this body. It was a 8megapixel body, that was lightweight and very quiet. The shutter was quiet and had smooth "fffftttt" sound. For what it was worth, it was my intro to SLRs at the time. Admittingly, the body felt flimsy, and coupled with the grip, it did make it feel slightly heftier, and more balanced when using a beast of a 70-200mm lens. In retrospect, my biggest gripes about that body was the dark and small viewfinder. That and menu settings were horrible. You get used to it after awhile, but to change the focus points, adjust ISOs, aperature, shutter speed was kind of a hasle. You had to press a button, then jog the wheel. I was also annoyed at the max shutter. It was limited to 1/4000th of a second. Which meant when taking portraits in really bright situations, wanting to shoot slightly wide, was next to impossible. Things were waay too bright, so it forced me to stop down. The picture quality on the XT was great, I had absolutely no complaints in that department. I was looking for a step up into a prosumer body. Enter the 10D & 20D

10D
The 10D was made of magnesium, was a 6.3 megapixel body, but if you're reading this. You already know that not all pixels are created equal. This camera can dance with the rest of them and then some. The shutter was a tad more quiet, but where the XT had a woosh ffft sound. This shutter had a resounding 'Thunk' sound. Had oomf to it. I used this in tandem with the 20D which I'll get into later. But the 10D to this day felt better in my hands than any other prosumer body. I can't really explain it. I'm not sure if it was the texture, the weight, something about it felt right. It still has the limitations of 1/4000th of a second, but the controls were easy to use and navigate. Much easier than the XT. ISO handling was so so. I got nervous shooting ISO 800 and above, but images came out crisp and can be blown up to 8x10 8x12 no with no problems. I think I went as far as blowing one up much larger (though it was on a canvas print so IQ wasn't too much of an issue). My complaints was the buffer was tiny. I remember shooting continuous burst, the camera would say waiting..waiting..until the buffers cleared up. I missed a few shots that way. It was rather annoying. Also startup time on that body was pretty sad. Turn it on and you waited for a bit before you could shoot. That and the fact that I couldn't easily interchange my EF-S lenses with my 20D eventually prompted me to bite the bullet yet again to upgrade to a 30D.

20D
The 20D...well that was one of my favorite bodies and I really didn't want to part with it for awhile. It was the successor to the 10D. The body was mostly the same, the controls were essentially the same, so it felt like a natural upgrade. No learning curve. The only difference was it was blazingly fast. Startup times were excellent, ISO ranges were better (though grainy at 1600 and 3200 ISO's). It bursted much faster than the 10D. 5FPS, and was 8.3mpixels. The viewfinder was larger and brighter. It was a night and day difference when looking at the 350XT viewfinder vs. the 20D/10D. My biggest complaint with the 20D was the gawd awful clunk it made. A minor complaint, and I got used to it, but boy was it cacophonous. The 10/20D combo worked well, but like I mentioned before. The minor annoyances with the 10D made me re-evaluate my choices. Doing post processing with different camera resolutions for designing albums was a pain. The ability to swap lenses between the bodies were also limited due to the non EF-S support. Right about this time, the 30D's were released, and i really had no interest in upgrading my 20D. It was going to be the camera I planned on using for a long while. Oh how quickly things changed.

30D
I first saw the 30D in action when my friend Grant whipped out his. I was blown away by the 2.5inch screen. That was all I noticed. The ladies can attest, what a difference an .7 inches make! The 20D's 1.8inch screen was miniscule compared to it. That and the RGB histogram on the 30D. So one day I bunkered down and decided to replace the 10D with a 30D. I know many people complained that the 30D was a 20D with minor upgrades. That was what I thought too, and was hesitant to go there, but once I got there, there was no looking back. The useful features I found on the 30D was incremental ISO's by 1/3rd stops. for instance on the 20D, I can go ISO 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, and 3200. With the 30D's I jumped around to 125, 150, 200, 250, 320 etc. It let me fine tune to the situation more. That and spot metering proved very helpful at times. They also added even more buffer space to the 30D, so bursts of 9 in raw were well needed. Made for good cake cutting and bouquet tossing shots. It was very soon after that I sold my 20D to a Kelli, a friend of mine who wanted to go on photo outings with her husband. She uses the Kit lens with the camera...which I guess is like owning a Porsche and putting low end Wallmart tires on it. At the end of the day, it's still a mean looking Porsche that will still kick butt. But man, can it do more damage. Anyways, I digress. So my workflow and tools finally evolved to having 2 similar bodies. That made for ease of operations, no lens incompatibility issues. To be honest I have no real complaints at all about the 30D. It's a fantastic tool. The results were consistent no matter which camera I was using. Everything was good. Until the upgrade bug came and bit me in the ass.

5D
I've sold off one of my 30D's which, in retrospect I was really sad to see leave. It's like one of your kids moving off to college. But that's ok, I have another twin at home, so I don't feel too bad. And bought a 5D. It's a full frame sensor so your lenses act the way they're supposed to. For instance a 35mm lens is ...35mm. There's no crop factor (multiply it all by 1.6) like the APS-C sensors. Off hand I think my initial reactions to the 5D was wow..this viewfinder is huge and bright! Holy smokes. It's slightly larger than the 30D, and has nifty features like uber low 50IS0 settings, but it's the same camera IMO only full frame and slow. It's only 3FPS...and yes there's a HUGE difference in speed between 3 and 5FPS. Though if you really want to be impressed, hit the shutter of a 1DMII...8.5FPS sounds like machine gun fire. Anyways, so the only analogous thing I can think of about the 5D is...It's sorta like an ugly or average person walking into a room full of models. It makes you feel inadequate really really fast. What do I mean by that? Well at 12.8 megapixels, it makes any and I mean ALL of your existing compact flash cards feel dirt slow. It take ages to refresh the buffer once I've bursted my 9 frames. With the full frame sensor, it will utilize every portion of your lens. The 1.6 crop bodies make lenses fantastic as it only focuses on the center/sweet spot, as it's a much smaller sensor. So the weakest portion of the lens (the corners) are generally ignored. With a full frame sensor, you get everything, so your weak lenses become weaker with more vignetting etc, and your best lenses, well. They struggle to hang on. I think I took a step back in the incompatibility department again. The 5D doesn't take EF-S lenses, and now there's a difference between image sizes for layout/graphics work. So I'm sorta back to square one, similar to the situation between my 10D and 20D combo. Haha..though I really really can't afford 2 5D bodies, I'll be trying to use this combo for a looong while. Now I guess I should start looking for SanDisk Ultra III and ultra IV's. *sigh* As for gripes, well..aside for making everything feel weaker and inadequate, the body is slower. I don't really take it out for sports shooting or birding. The 30D is more suited for that in my opinion. But for portraits and group shots, it does a marvelous job.

-NLE 02-23-07