What is equivalent to A2E?

[BobbyR]

Hi Bob and others:
I want to purchase a new Canon DSLR.  I've been visiting Canon forums for a while and I'm still having trouble equating the image quality of my Canon A2E with Canon's DSLRs.  Forum posts of 5D users frequently put down the image quality of 30D, 40D users.  L lens users often imply consumer lenses are not sufficient for DSLRs.  I'm mostly a landscape photographer with some auto racing, car, and flower photography mixed in.  My lens are Canon 28-105mm and 100-300mm plus extension tubes.  When shooting landscapes I normally use Fuji Velvia 50 film with the camera on a tripod.

What Canon DSLRs will give me equal or better image quality than my equipment and film combination?  I read portions of DP's 50D review.  It seems obvious my lenses would degrade the camera's capability.  Which, if any, lens(es) should I consider purchasing to support your camera suggestions?  My price range is $2000 + or -.

Thanks for your time
Bob 

[BobbyR]

Hi:
I was hoping someone would take the time to respond to my question or at least point me to articles I could read.  Since it became apparent that wasn't going to happen I went looking for some guidance elsewhere.  I believe I found some on the Lunimous Landscapes website:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/d30/d30_vs_film.shtml 

The article doesn't eliminate the learning curve I have in front of me as I move into the digital SLR world.  I'm sure I have lots to learn about post processing a digital image.  It does, however, seem to give me a camera baseline for comparing DSLR to SLR images.

Bob

[Bob Atkins]

Sorry I missed your question!

I'd say that the EOS 40D or EOS 50D would be the approximate digital equivalents of the old Canon A2E film camera. No DLSR has eye control focus of course, but otherwise their feature set is pretty similar and they occupy the mid price range in EOS DLSRs as the A2E did for film based SLRs. Of course both offer a lot of things the A2E never had (nor could it have had since it wasn't digital!).

Right now the 40D is selling at around $900 and the 50D at around $1200, so it depends on what you want to spend. Having spent a week with the 50D (I'll be writing up a review fairly soon), I'd say that I'd take a 50D over a 40D, but since I already have a 40D, I'm not sure the 50D is worth the $600 or so it would cost me to upgrade (and that's assuming I could get $600 for my used 40D). The 40D is nice and I've been quite happy with it.