I lost lost of my lenses etc. for my camera in Portugal. 
It was a pretty expensive mistake and has me pondering what I’m going to do when xti dies. According to the internet, the rate I shoot at and how many shots I have taken he should have a solid 1-1.5 years left in him. That will put me square in the middle of canon’s next generation of slrs when I need to buy a new one. Coincidentally Sept. 1 canon is having a news conference on this very matter. The rumours have it they will be talking about their next group of 1.6x crop frames. Given that I shoot ef-s lenses and canon this is kinda useful to me.
Apparently they will be discussing the 7D, an upcoming little brother to the 5DmkII and the successor to the 50D, the 60D. I’m sure there will be more megapixels involved and to be honest I could really care less. I can already shoot poster sized pictures as long as I don’t do something disastrously wrong. The following are the things I *really* want:
1) Better auto-iso. I have no auto-iso and I *hate* screwing around with iso to take a shot. I played with the new auto-iso on the t1i, it’s nice, but if you want fast shots there’s not enough control. The Nikon auto-iso is just too complicated to ever even think of using. Give me something that offers a little of a) a little of b). Just let my camera get out of my way while I’m shooting.
2) Better low light noise control. Yeah, the t1i is *amazing* as compared to my xti but I think they can do better still. Stop pumping megapixels and start pumping clean noiseless iso levels. That’s *way* *way* more useful to me for what I use my camera for.
3) On that note. Better white balance at night!!!! No matter what I do with my xti all my night shots turn out totally orange. And the custom white balance is so well hidden you’d think they deliberatly did not want you to use it. Yeah, this can be fixed after the fact, but who wants to be screwing around fixing all of their shots???
4) Better auto-focus. I don’t know if it’s just me, but when I play with Nikons they just seem to nail the focus more often in auto-focus mode. If I want to be sure of hitting the focus I have to first focus on the center point then frame my shot after. Annoying. Particularly when I give the camera to someone else and they tray and take a shot and the focus just hunts.
5) Last but not least. The ability to totally turn off the ridiculous noise control. I have found looking at other people’s pics on their t1is that they all seem to just smudge out the detail in the middle of things like bushes while maintaining nice sharp edges. Even at low iso like iso 100… What’s up with that?
I’ve loved xti. Make me proud again canon.