Announced today was a new camera to the Canon lineup that will fit between the xxD series, such as the 40D and 50D, and the 5D II: the 7D.  Read the announcement and preview at DPReview. It appears to be a D300S killer, and it’s refreshing to see Canon being agressive rather than lazily updating the xxD line (again).  Sporting an 18 megapixel sensor and two CPUs, it captures images at 8FPS and, supposedly, will have great autofocus.  Of course, the 1D Mark III was supposed to have great autofocus, too, so I’m sure the jury will be out on this one for a while.  But this does seem to be an answer to the problem of wanting an “action” (sports or wildlife) camera without having the bulk of a 1D series body.  I’m very excited by the idea of this new body, I just hope that the execution meets my very, very high expectations.  After the debacle with the 1D Mark III, anything like this that has a processor dedicated to autofocus should do the job damn well, because this camera might be testing the waters for a new 1D Mark IV coming down the pipeline.  So if the autofocus on this camera sucks, it will be a bad omen for the Mark IV.

Speculation aside, this body seems to have some of the refinements that the 5D Mark II should have, such as the dedicated dial to switch between standard Live View and Movie mode.  And I love the idea of having built-in wireless flash control.  If it could do it without use of the popup flash, like the Nikon CLS system, then it will be even better (not sure of the details).  Will this be the answer to the D300S?  I sure hope so, because the proposition to switching to Nikon is just too expensive for me!