Talking to Warehouse Express, it's seems the whole Canon DSLR range is in huge demand from the 350D upwards and they just can't get enough of them quickly enough. Business must be good.
A few quick comments on the 1DMK11N.
They've replaced the rather complicated color matrix settings with custom settings..
- Standard: for crisp, vivid images
- Portrait: optimizes colour tone and saturation and weakens sharpening
- Landscape: for punchier greens and blues with stronger sharpening
- Neutral: ideal for post-processing
- Faithful: - adjusts colour to match the subject colour when shot under 5200K
- Monochrome for black and white with a range of filter effects (yellow, orange, red and green)
- Monochrome - toning effects (sepia, blue, purple and green).
Neutral is the obvious choice for RAW processing with the other settings giving great results with jpegs with the minimum of post processing. These same custom settings have been adopted in the 5D so no doubt will find their way into all the new cameras as they're introduced. So far I really like this idea, it's really quick to select a custom setting for a particular type of shot, and you can alter the parameters anyway if you wish. Further custom settings will be available for download from Canon, but there are none on their site as yet.
The 1:3 crop ratio is more significant than you may think - apart from the brighter viewfinder, my 50mm lens is effectively an 80mm on the 20D, while on the 1D it's 65mm, so there are quite substantial gains in FOV with wider lenses, though you'll just crop more at the tele end so you 'lose' a little there.
Spot metering and multi spot metering is a huge bonus. You can take up to 8 spot readings from key parts of your subject with the camera working out the optimum exposure as you go - really convenient for difficult situations.
One of the things which bugged me before I took the plunge and bought the camera was whether I'd see any significant jump in resolution from the 20D and I think the answer has be .." No ...hardly any", although the camera has a colour correction filter on the chip for more faithful colour rendition and it's supposed to produce slightly less noise, but let's be honest, the 20D is no slouch for producing low noise shots anyway. All that moolah just goes into making the camera, a fantastic photographic tool which is a pleasure to use, coupled with the weather proofing, and build quality, 45 point auto focus system, very logical operating system, you wont necessarily get better shots - you'lll just have less excuses for missing 'em.
I'd highly recommend one, just make sure the SD card slot works.