Just saw something...
Theres DSLR and advanced digital cameras or something like that..
Apparently SLRs rely on the ability to interchange lenses, to achieve a perfect shot..
The other has a lens built in that zooms etc. Most cannot interchange lenses..
You know, I think you need to decide how much you want to spend. The Canon G9 can be operated just about fully manually but is still compact enough to put in your shirt pocket, and you don't have to fiddle around with lenses. If you intend to be using the DSLR in point&shoot mode you won't learn anything anycase.
SLRs aren't better because their lenses are better. Many point&shoots have very very high quality glass. If you think about it, these days they have to be able to resolve 10MP+ through that tiny piece of glass, so it has to be pretty high quality glass. SLRs are better (in terms of image quality) because their lenses are wider and their sensors are bigger, which mean they can resolve details much better, capture more light, use less electronic trickery i.e. cause less noise, and they tend to have more powerful processors, so their jpeg output is better than what you get from a P&S. Point in case, the Canon G9. 12MP, and it can do RAW. The JPEGs from it, if you look closely, look just as smudgy as from any other P&S I've owned, but if you look at the RAW files from it, there is a heck of a lot more detail. So, the camera loses a lot of detail when converting to JPEG, and this is because it's not powerful enough to do the same quailty conversion (you could argue that's done on purpose - marketing...).
bwana: Well you do make good points about the 400D. It's not that much different. I wanted to ask you - that whole 1.5fps RAW thing about the 1000D - does it have any effect on the images? I know it means the buffer is smaller, which means it can't store as many RAW shots in the buffer, but what does that all actually mean? The only other thing that I like is the autolighting optimizer of the 1000D. I watched the video on the Canon site last night and I was amazed.
Well, of course that video would be too good to be true. They choose the image matter for those videos really carefully so that the feature performs as good as it possibly can. They want you to sell your 400D and get the 1000D. You know what, when you're out there taking your pictures, all those wizz-bang features only give you consistent, good results if you are in good conditions. As soon as your conditions become challenging - too many different light sources, too much contrast in the scene, etc - those features will start failing you, and you will have to be able to work out how to take that shot properly yourself. If you learned to shoot while relying on those features, and those features fail you, guess what? You'll miss the shot.
Anyway, those features don't help you much when you're shooting RAW anycase.
