New Camera

Even though I haven't been doing much with the images (printing, viewing) from my Canon powershot s45 I wanted a new camera. I was dissatisfied with its shutter lag and low-light performance. I've been wanting to take better surreptitious photos for which improved speed and a flip-out lens would help (then I could hold the camera at waist-level). The small Sony's were twice as fast as the other cameras but not as highly rated. The Canon's above and below mine in size had flip-outs but I wasn't sure the larger one was pocketable or that I wanted to decrease image quality by going smaller.

Suddenly I decided that I needed a real camera. The images I wanted the highest quality for are (generally) the ones where I know I'll need a camera beforehand. If it wasn't going to be pocketable an SLR made the most sense because of flexibility. I have a Nikon SLR with two prime lenses (50 and 24), there was also a heavy zoom at one point but I don't know where it is. I also have a Canon powershot s45. If I got a Nikon I could use the old lenses and if I got a Canon the same software, and batteries and charger. Possibly also the same card but I'm not sure I'd want that.
It turns out there is a staggering amount of information on the web. I decided to go with the and Rebel XT for the weight, image quality, future flexibility with lenses. The most useful sites
were dpreview.com (image comparisons here were initially unhelpful because often a camera would be compared to an older version of another camera. But was useful using the comparisons from both candidate cameras and overlapping the windows. Dpreview was more useful than imaging-resources.com due to the 100% views and more consistent examples.)
Canon vs. Nikon seems to be another PC. vs. Mac debate. The Nikon owners seem to be a bit more fanatic.

Here are some of the things I found interesting:
Comparisons
DPreview- purchase frequency, review ranking, side-by-side
Imaging-resource- has qualitative and quantitative information on all parts- cameras, lenses, scanners, printers.
Photodo- Lens grades
nobell.org- Lens data lists
Fredmiranda- user ratings of lenses
Bobatkins- gallery software, looks like some good articles. He also has good reviews (e.g this on Tamron 28-75) on photo.net.
Patrick Murphy Studio- lens comparison web sites, lens lists
Amazon.com- User comments- due to its ranking system, and nice interface. dpreview has terrible interface. Photo.net gets bogged down in flames.


General information
Photozone- lens myths sensor size MTF (a lens metric) . The reviews are good but less quantitative than dpreview and no new info on qualatative end. Tutorials too.
Popphoto- some useful articles but impossible to tell which from titles. cameras and lenses (not so good and in acrobat format)
Luminous Landscape-

Prices-
Photography equipment especially seems to cause some websites (Amazon, B&H) to do the add-to-cart-before-price thing. Choose beachcamera.com

Things I found out
Fredmiranda.com has some Adobe plugins for cleaning-up and manipulating images.
You can store data on your DV tapes.
I can increase my stealth by putting my s45 at waist level and shooting wide without looking.
When using a scanner some of the noise may be from the negative. Slides have less noise.
Film scanners are much better than flatbed using a print.
The "Lens myths" page has changed some of my thinking. Especially about canon 50mm 1.4 vs. 1.8. It seems that pictures will be nearly equivalent after f1.8. This is contrary to reports about it ramping up faster since it starts faster and comments on lens quality.
Photo contests