I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post that I upgraded from my Rebel XT to the new Rebel XSi but besides the pic­tures I posted didn’t really say much about the cam­era. So far I’ve been very happy with the results.

Even though there is only a few years and a slightly dif­fer­ent name sep­a­rat­ing these cam­eras the actual expe­ri­ence is very much improved. The three things that stand out are:

1. The Screen

On the XT cam­era infor­ma­tion was shown on a small black and white LCD dis­play that was often dif­fi­cult to read and the pre­view of the pho­to­graph was shown on a color dis­play directly beneath it. The XSi does away with the dual dis­play and gives you one fat 3″ screen for both cam­era infor­ma­tion and pre­view. The dis­play is very bright and works well even in full sun­light. When you put your eye up to cam­era a light sen­sor detects you and turns the dis­play off.

2. IS Lens

I got the XSi at Best Buy where it comes stan­dard with a Canon IS (Opti­cal Image Sta­bi­lizer) lens. IS works much bet­ter than expected. It effec­tively stops the shake from my hand push­ing the shutter-release but­ton even at low shut­ter speeds.

3. 12.2 MegaPixels

That’s more than a 50 per­cent increase from the XT. It’s nice to have that extra infor­ma­tion for larger prints or tighter crops.

Best Buy has a deal that comes with a nice bag, extra bat­tery, and a UV fil­ter for an extra $50. Highly recommended.