CANON EOS 50D

Canon broke with its tradition of upgrading the line every 18 months, introducing the EOS 50D just 12 months from the introduction of the 40D. It's inside where you'll find the Canon 50D's major changes. First is the new 15.1-megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor, a significant upgrade from the 40D's 10-megapixel sensor. Major changes to the design of the microlens array as well as to the sensor itself have actually reduced sensor noise despite the increase in resolution. The change has allowed Canon to offer a wider range of ISO settings than the company has ever offered, ranging from ISO 100 to 3,200, plus two higher settings: H1 is equivalent to ISO 6,400 and H2 takes the camera to 12,800.
Canon's new DIGIC 4 processor is a part of the equation, moving the extra data at a faster pace than its predecessor, and keeping the camera to a high 6.3 frames per second while maintaining that 14-bit data for RAW images

Two Small RAW Formats

In addition to the RAW and JPEG image capture modes that photographers are accustomed to, the EOS 50D Digital SLR camera now offers more manageable resolution settings and file sizes with two sRAW recording formats, sRAW1 and sRAW2. At the sRAW1 setting, resolution is 7.1 megapixels with a file size that is approximately 25 percent smaller than a standard 15.1 megapixel RAW image. With the sRAW2 setting, resolution is 3.8 megapixels at less than half the file size of a standard RAW image, retaining all of the flexibility and creative possibilities associated with full-size, conventional RAW images. The EOS 50D is the first Canon Digital SLR that allows the use of RAW and sRAW settings in Basic Zone as well as Creative Zone shooting modes, even further improving the camera's flexibility.
Other software enhancements include a new vignetting correction, Automatic Lighting Optimizer with three levels, adjustable noise reduction, a Creative Auto mode, a lens micro adjustment function, and face detection autofocus in Live View mode.

Peripheral illumination correction
As part of the camera's internal image processing, the Canon EOS 50D Digital SLR camera conducts peripheral illumination correction, which automatically evens brightness across the image field, making an image of a blue sky even toned throughout, a function previously accomplished through post-processing software on a personal computer. Thanks largely to the DIGIC 4 processor, this automatic adjustment can be made in-camera during shooting with JPEG images or corrected in post-photoshoot processing with RAW images through Canon's Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software, which is supplied at no extra charge.

EOS Integrated Cleaning System
The Self-Cleaning Sensor Unit for the Canon EOS 50D has also been upgraded and now includes a fluorine coating on the low-pass filter for better dust resistance. The Self-Cleaning Sensor Unit uses ultrasonic vibrations to shake dust particles off of the low-pass filter in front of the sensor each time the camera is powered up or shut down. The second part of the system includes a software component where sensor spots are mapped and saved as Dust Delete Data that is attached to the image file for removal during post processing using Canon's DPP software.
Auto Lighting Optimizer
The Auto Lighting Optimizer allows the photographer to expose for the highlights, and then the camera adjusts the image to open up the shadows during image capture. On the Canon 50D, ALO now has four settings, including Off, Low, Medium, or Strong.
AE Bracketing

HDR (High Dynamic Range) shooters have a new tool in the Canon 50D's enhanced AE Bracketing feature. The new feature allows you to bracket images starting from four stops darker or ending four stops brighter than the meter's selected exposure value, over a two-stop range, when combining exposure compensation with AE Bracketing.
AF Micro-adjustment

The Canon 50D's lens micro-adjustment function allows focus to be fine-tuned for twenty different lenses, negating issues with back- or front-focusing. The adjustment is then stored in the camera body for use whenever the lenses are attached. (Lenses are identified by the combination of focal length and maximum aperture; the camera can't distinguish between multiple lenses of the same aperture and focal length.) Many new SLR photographers assume their lenses will be perfect, but not all lenses are created equal. Each lens can have individual quirks that make them focus slightly in front of or behind the subject, among other variables. It used to be that you had to send your camera and lenses to the factory to have them tuned to your individual body, but with the Canon 50D you can approximate that with the Micro-adjustment feature, nested in the.
HDMI output

Also helping catch up with the latest offerings, the Canon 50D includes an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) port, for displaying images on a high-definition television.
UDMA card support. The new Canon 50D supports even unreleased UDMA cards, up to UDMA-6, capable of transferring up to 133MB per second. The current fastest cards, UDMA-3, handle data transfer rates of up to 45MB per second.
New LCD Viewfinder
significant upgrade to the Canon EOS 50D camera is its large, clear 3.0-inch Clear View LCD screen which features 920,000 dot/VGA resolution, four times the pixel count of the EOS 40D camera's screen, for better clarity and color. To help show off those fantastic shots, the EOS 50D camera includes an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) output to display crisp, clear images on a High-Definition TV. The EOS 50D recognizes the needs of today's photographers, and the faster processing speed of the DIGIC 4 processor helps support UDMA cards for faster writing of image files.