[*isteve]

Is there something extremely terrifying or horrid about apologizing?

I edited the post - does it meet with your approval now?

They also claimed somewhere that the 50D body outresolves a lot of glass, something I have not found to be true either. There's a huge amount of detail in a 50D shot compared to a 20D shot (8MP) with the same lens. If their claims were correct I would not see that.

pingflood, doesn't your example actually only prove that a 20D body does not outresolve the glass. If you'd say that you get more detail with your current 1Ds mk II than with your 50D, then it would support your comment.

[pingflood]

I agree with you there. I guess I was just underwhelmed that they didn't update the AF, especially for a pretty high-end and pretty expensive camera body. I guess I assumed that a newer, more expensive and higher-end camera (compared to 40/50D) would have same or better AF.

Yeah, the 5D is a bit of an odd duck. It's like a lower end body than the 40D/50D in all aspects except for the sensor/processing. Lousy weather sealing, oldest AF in the lineup, etc.

I think a lot of people wish it was a "3D" -- i.e. a 1 series in a smaller body.

[Yohan Pamudji]

pingflood, doesn't your example actually only prove that a 20D body does not outresolve the glass. If you'd say that you get more detail with your current 1Ds mk II than with your 50D, then it would support your comment.

No, because 1DsII (16MP FF) has bigger pixels than 50D (15MP 1.6x). 50D works the glass harder than 1DsII (did I just make an inadvertent ice hockey reference?).

But really we won't know for sure whether we've hit the limits of glass until a new higher res camera comes out that doesn't resolve any better than the previous one. We haven't hit that point yet. It could very well be that 15MP 1.6x of the 50D is pushing the limits, but we won't know until a higher-res 1.6x comes out that offers no resolving power increase over the 50D.

[pingflood]

All I know is that I see far more detail in the 50D files than 20D files, and the 20D is pretty close to the 40D resolution wise, so thus my conclusion.

I guess that at some point diffraction results in no resolution gain from increasing the number of pixels on the sensors, and my guess is that we are getting pretty close to that.