I recently bought the 50D having been a photographer of a film SLR camera for many years. I gave up taking pictures for a while due to the amount of money I needed to learn more things, and came back to photography after testing digital photography with the wonderful Canon Powershot G9.

I recently purchased the 50D a short time before the 7D was released: the 50D is now much cheaper than what it was when you wrote your post. As a general advice for newcomers, I would say that most of the dSLR stuff you can buy is good enough. However, the latest technology is usually much more expensive than what IMHO is worth. People are prone to buy the latest gear because we all are partly geeks, and because we all like to show off how smart we were to buy the latest. I keep cool and buy the almost-latest version of the same product, that is usually much cheaper than its latest version whereas it does not differ much from the latest one.

The question now -April 2010- may be whether buying the 7D or the 50D, or the 500D or the 550D: go for the 50D or the 500D!!! Forget about the latest, and spend the saved budget on lens, which was one of your ideas.

I have just read most of the post and I miss some comments about other good lenses on non-Canon items. Other brands like Sigma or Tamron offer professional quality lenses at a much better price. In addition, other cheap lenses -Canon or other brands- yield pretty good results two apertures down from the maximum.