Those leaked EOS D50 specs on Canon’s Chinese site? Real. The official announcement came today and everything tallies with what we saw on Friday. 15.1 megapixel CMOS sensor (with 1.6x crop factor), a big 3″ LCD screen, Live View (for previewing images on the screen), ISO running up to 12800 (in a special, try-not-to-use-it hidden mode) and, possibly the most interesting, Canon’s new image processing chip, the DIGIC 4. In digicams, the two things which impact the picture quality (after the light has made it in through the lens) are the sensor and the image processor. The 50D is the first Canon camera to use the new DIGIC 4 chip, and it appears to be an incremental upgrade.
If you have a fast enough memory card (Compact Flash) then you’ll get a whopping 90 jpeg images in a single burst, at up to 6.3 fps. RAW shooters see a smaller improvement: you get 16 shots before the camera pauses for breath. The new DIGIC also includes face detection (up to 35 faces!) and in-camera vignetting controls with supported EF lenses. This last gets the rather fancy title of “Peripheral Illumination Correction”. There is also built-in sensor cleaning along with dust removal software which, in a fit of alliteration, Canon has named “Dust Delete Data Detection”. Other goodies include HDMI out and nine-point autofocus. The price for all these whizz-bang features? $1400.
