The Canon 350D is a great quality digital SLR camera for the beginner photographer or ordinary consumer looking for a hi-end product. It comes highly recommended from experienced photographers as a first digital SLR camera buy (along with the Nikon D50.) There are several knob settings: landscape, macro/close, person, night-shots, automatic, no flash, time value, aperature value and manual. My setting recommendations would be to let the pictures be taken in RAW format since there will be no compression; making it easier for editing. When you buy the product, make sure to get the warranty if its available! This is an excellent product but if anything were to happen, it is a small price to pay and Canon will make due on the warranty (weasle free, no questions asked.) Also, buy a protective lense to prevent scratching. It screws onto the lens barrel end and is only $10 (compared to $150 something it will cost to replace the lens itself.)
SLR (single-lens reflex) is a camera type that allows for multiple lenses to be fitted to the camera base unit. The most extreme SLR enthusiasts will sometimes have over 10 lenses (eg. distance zoom, extreme macro, light sensitive.) Although, if you don't really care for these things, you can at least depend upon SLR providing top quality and natural looking pictures. The standard lens that comes with this model lets you snap pictures in 15, 35 and 55mm format. It has an 8Mpixel resolution and I see absolutely no pixelation in the pictures at all even at top zoom in my image editor (I believe this is also due to it being SLR.) I found the camera menu'ng easy to use and was even able to dive into a little bit of the amateur photographer settings. Check out
my Flickr site to see the type of photographs taken.
The setup in Linux was a little tricky and I had some problems getting gphoto2 and KDE's DigiKam to recognize the device. This will be especially true if you are working with a "from-scratch" distribution like Gentoo. SuSE, Ubuntu and Fedora will probably handle these problems better since they are highly configured for these situations straight from fresh install. The solution to this though is setting the transfer mode on the camera to PTP mode and not PC connection. If you are still having problems, you will need to add the vendor/product entry into your /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap file as such...
Code:
usbcam 0x003 0x04a9 0x30ef 0x0000 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00
After doing this, make sure to add your user ID to the /etc/group file under the usb group and run this as root...
Code:
chown -R root:usb /proc/bus/usb
These steps will ensure that you are given proper permission to the USB device and the hotplug system will recognize it. You should then be able to run gphoto2 and it will detect the device.
I am extremely happy with this camera and I think you will be too, but if you are still having trouble, feel free to check out these resource or send me a message (if all else fails.)
*http://www.xqt98.dial.pipex.com/dell/insts/eos300d.html
*http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_a_digital_camera
*http://cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/