Soon as it was out, I bought the EOS D20. I sold my D60, which I had replaced my D30 with, so I am obviously generally pleased with Canon's line. The new camera has a lot over the D60 -- 2 more megapixels (or 3500 high for panoramas), much better low-light shooting ability with low-noise high-ISO, and fast shooting (5 frames/second for 25 frames.) It also has better focus, better controls, and an orientation sensor, something I've been wanting for a long time.

The orientation sensor is botched though. The menu offers the ability to rotate pictures in the display based on the orientation. Not what I want, so I turned it off. Sadly, this ended up turning off even the recording of the orientation sensor, which is stupid. You want this screen rotate off because it makes the picture half the size to do it, and it's wrong if the camera is being held in portrait mode, as it may be on a tripod. The right thing to do would be to rotate based on the camera's orientation -- if I shot in portrait and I show in portrait it should fill the screen. However, generally I don't want the display rotate on the small screen, I can just turn the camera in my hands.

Turning off the sensor recording without this mode is incredibly stupid, I hope they fix that in future firmware. Frankly, I would have them rotate the actual picture as they store it with a lossless rotate. It's a pain to have to run special software (theirs sucks) to convert all the pictures after you shoot them. Part of why I wanted the software was to get away from this annoying task.

For a decade or more, video cameras have come with a small pinhole next to the screw tripod mount. Mounting plates have a pin that goes in there to mount the camera securely. Why do still cameras never come with this hole? It would make the mounting much more secure.

The camera has a full zoom in, something the Canon DSLRs were very slow to adopt. But nobody yet has a "smart" zoom-in, which zooms directly to a 1:1 view of the highest contrast element in the scene, or alternately to one of the focus points that it did the autofocus on (though that can move.) This would let me quickly see if shots were blurry or not. If the highest contrast portion of the scene is not in focus, the whole thing is blurry. If it's in focus but was not at the distance of my subject, I know I shot the wrong thing, and can correct it now. You don't see that on the small screen.

Can't say I'm thrilled with combining the on/off for the back-wheel with the on-off for the camera. I always want that wheel on.

And yes, it's time for DSLRs to get live preview. They can do it, they already split the beam a couple of ways -- most of the light to the eyepiece, but part of it to the autofocus/light meter instruments. Low-res sensors are now cheap enough that you could put one in to perform all those roles and also allow live preview. Live preview isn't just for cheap point and shoot cameras. Yes, through-the-lens is better for composing most shots, but I love how on my G5 I can shoot in places I can't get my eye to the viewfinder, like when the camera is held above my head, at my waist, on the ground, on my knee for stability etc.

And nobody has yet imported features like Nikon's Best-Shot-Selector, a bracketing mode which picks the least blurry of a series of shots in low light. Of course you can do this by just keeping all the shots.

But as I said, I am generally satisfied, but it doesn't mean they can't keep improving.