Canon EOS Rebel T1i / 500D

Steve’s Digicams has published their review of the Canon EOS Rebel T1i / 500D [Specs], a DSLR whichoffers "class leading ISO capabilities" and featuring 15.1MP resolution (on a 22.3 x 14.9 mm CMOS sensor), an extra large 3.0-in. high resolution (920K dots) LCD, Integrated Cleaning System, 9-point Phase Detection AF, Live View, PASM, Shutter Speed range of 30 – 1/4000 sec. plus Bulb, Continuous 3.4fps, and RAW file format.

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This is an open invitation to our readers to join Google Friend Connect. It’s free and, as most Google features usually do, it’s growing by leaps and bounds. You can use your Google Account [You don't have one? Get one! ;o)], AIM, Yahoo! or OpenID to sign up. This instantly allows you to comment on our articles, news, reviews and tutorials — plus rate them, too!

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– My Wong, Editor

Every new digicam seems to sport a 12 megapixel resolution image sensor these days. More megapixels generally mean more pixels to capture an image — and hence theoretically more detail that can be captured by the sensor.

But is that true in practice? Do you see better image quality as megapixels increase?

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We will be slowly transitioning to our new design starting today. This means that the home page for http://www.photoxels.com will now become http://www.photoxels.com/photography.

Both sites will be up and running in parallel and we will not rush the transition. This gives our readers time to get used to the new design, send us their valuable feedback — and help us keep our sanity ;o).

The new design has a cleaner interface and each article is tagged with appropriate keywords, which makes it real easy to search for related items.

All the great features you’ve come to love will still be available, and we plan to add more.

One new feature we are really excited to offer our readers is a number of flexible ways to contribute their views to the site:

1. Comment. All you need to comment to a news item is to enter a valid email.
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I read a series of posts recently on a forum where a couple of photographers admitted that they still used film (and digital, too) and preferred film for the total experience it gave them.

One photographer then went on to say that the real pros would never switch to digital because there was something special about using film that you don’t get with using digital.

That is very true! However, it also reminded me of the time when word processors started becoming popular — and reading interviews after interviews where successful writers vowed they would never switch because there was something magical about hitting the typewriter keys, advancing to a new line, even changing paper that helped them think and weave words — an experience that they did not get from using a computer and a cheap word processor program.

However, today we don’t hear of any successful writers still using the typewriter — or complaining that they are a worse writer because of the word processor. The word processor has replaced the typewriter. Whether some of us like it or not, digital will eventually replace film.

It’s never easy to shift to a new medium (digital) once we have mastered the old one (film). Especially if we try very hard and find that we cannot be as good using the new as we are using the old.  Or, we might simply prefer the old over the new.

Thankfully, good artistry is always recognized and valued whether it comes from film or digital, and there will probably always be a market (often, a very lucrative one) for excellent film photographs.

Many years from now, a new medium will exist to record images — and digital photographers would then be the ones vowing they will never change!

Happy New Year 2009!

We hope the past year has been good for you and offer our best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year 2009!

This should be an exciting year. We hope this is the year we see the larger APS-sized image sensors being introduced into the compact non-DSLR digital cameras, which should in one swoop eliminate the image quality disparity between the compact digicams and the DSLRs. Being able to take low noise high ISO pictures remain the number one desire of point-and-shoot photographers.

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