Interesting thread on another forum.

[Shakespeare]

Perhaps it's just me (and my amateur status), but it seems to me the OP on this thread is vastly overcomplicating things, and/or too caught up in minutae. Most of the responses are informative (and patient).

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1031&message=28688263

[mth44sc]

1. I remember the first shots I took with my Canon EOS !D Mark II

I was horrified. I've since calmed down considerably :-)

[regnaD kciN]

5. Is that a new Canon model...

...or does the "!D" refer to your reaction you first heard the price? :evilgrin:

[mth44sc]

7. It wasn't hearing the price that did it

It was payin' the price :-)

[JeffR]

2. Yike. How hard it it to put the camera on auto and shoot?

And learn the fine points of shutter speed, aperture and ISO later?

And how wet behind the ears does one have to be to know that a 6-second exposure won't work out if the camera isn't kept steady? "Overcomplicating thing" is an understatement.

[regnaD kciN]

4. It's a bit more involved than that...

In all likelihood, his point'n'shoot was set up, as many of them are, to provide good results out of the box producing JPEGs that would be printed straight from the memory card -- in other words, with the camera applying some contrast adjustment, color boost and sharpening to each image. DSLRs don't do that, and tend to turn out "stock" images and leave it up to the user to do the appropriate post-processing. If you don't know how to do that (or, worse, don't know about the need to do that), you're probably going to find your images rather disappointing, especially if you start from the assumption that "a better camera means better pictures" automatically.

When I first dipped a toe into digital (after years of my film photography having decreased from a major hobby to a "take a few snapshots on vacation or when family visits" activity), I didn't buy a DSLR, but a Nikon 5700 that had pretty much all the manual controls of a DSLR, and even used RAW mode. The results, running it straight out of the box, were O.K. but not stellar, although I did get somewhat better as I got more used to it. However, my "awakening" came after a few shoots with superconnected, who was using an Olympus 3.2MP point'n'shoot. To my surprise, her photos came out looking a lot better than mine most of the time. (I'm talking purely about technical matters; she has always had an eye for compostion, so that didn't surprise me, but what was surprising was that her camera was turning out better-exposed, better-colored images that looked a lot sharper, even though it had only 60% of the pixel count of mine.) The reason, of course, was that her Olympus was designed to work at its best without later manipulation, whereas my Nikon worked like a DSLR and saved as much data as possible for post-processing. It was only after I learned to not simply auto-convert the RAWs to JPEG using Nikon View, but instead to load the images into Photoshop's RAW Converter and work from there, that I found myself getting results that were worthy of the camera. If I hadn't gone through that, and had instead first purchased a point'n'shoot designed to do all my thinking for me, I'm sure my first experience with a DSLR would have been as daunting as that of the OP in that thread.

[JeffR]

6. I agree to a point

but he implies that he wanted a DSLR so that he could avoid 'shopping, wrongheaded as that may be. And he says he doesn't want to shoot RAW.

He should be able to get much better results with an XSi than he has simply by setting the camera to Auto and trying out various picture styles, which would give him better contrast and color saturation than he's attained. Unless there's something amiss with the XSi manual, it shouldn't have taken him more than a few minutes to at least get that far.

Of course he could get even better results with more effort, pre- and post-, but Canon is pretty careful to pave the way for some instant gratification for novice users, and the XSi is a very smart camera that could essentially function as a P & S with multi-lens capability, which is what it sounds like he wants.

While I sympathize with his frustration, I'm still baffled by it.

[Shakespeare]

8. I thought the best, simplest advice to him was the suggestion to...

...double-shoot everything, once in auto and once manually, in a kind of learn-by-comparison with the camera's brain.

I feel bad for the guy, because he's robbing himself of being able to ENJOY his camera, which, presumably, is the reason all of us do this.

[NashVegas]

3. I Understand How He Feels

When I made my first foray into digital I thought it was a great rip-off.

[bvar22]

9. I was very disappointed with the early results from my Nikon D200.

I moved up to digital DSLR from an Olympus point & shoot.

Even in full Auto and saving as JPG, some camera setting tweaks are necessary for satisfactory images. The default settings on my Nikon out of the box were Flat, Dull, & Non Sharp.
The learning curve on adjusting internal processing is also pretty steep when you are stepping up from a point & shoot, and the manual is not very helpful. The Nikon manual describes HOW to make an adjustment, but not WHY.

I couldn't be happier with my Nikon now, but there were some teething pains.