Canon EOS 450D (EOS Digital Rebel XSi / EOS Kiss X2) review

All around good camera for the beginner/novice photographer. I got this as a gift from my wife and paired it with Canon's 1.8 50mm (Canon sells this lens for how much?!? I would suggest people get it now before Canon figures out the pricing mistake they made!!!) for portrait shots of my newborn. In a word: amazing! While the autofocus, would sometimes give me issues on which subject to focus on, I can also attribute that to my inexperience and the 50mm 1.8's shallow depth of field. In full manual with manual focus, you can tweak image quality to a maximum out of this camera and if you know what you're doing with image manipulation programs like GIMP or the Adobe programs or even Paint.net (although, I don't think Paint.net has .crw [raw file] capabilities) your shots could look professional. The camera also has aperture priority, shutter priority, and an automatic "manual" setting, as well as an automatic depth of field setting for allowing the camera to do various amounts of work. One can still get incredible quality images in the automatic settings, and the kit lens that comes with it helps produce very good quality images. The White Balance settings aren't always accurate in the AWB (automatic) mode, but once again, as I learn to use the different white balance settings, the image quality only gets better. To get the most out of this camera, I'd suggest a total beginner learn to use and tweak its settings... a little time gone, but anyone who takes out that time will be very nicely rewarded with excellent image quality and even better image quality when paired with a good lens. However, even a complete beginner (like I was when I first got this camera) will be extremely pleased with the quality of the images they get right out of the box with the kit lens.

Problems:

Autofocus not always accurate to intended subject.
White balance in AWB (automatic white balance) not always accurate.