At last I'm home! I said yesterday that I was going to London for the Canon Autumn Collection 2008 press launch. Well it turns out it wasn't in London but Reigate, which I had assumed was in London. In fact it's just south of London but from where I stayed in Finchley the night before it might as well have been on a different planet! It took me longer to go from Finchley to Reigate than it did from Sandbach to Finchley. Curse you M25!

Anyway the event went well but the day started with Phil Askey of dpreview.com posting all the juicy 5D details on his website before the event had even started. So there were no surprises at all for any attendees that were paying attention. Even so there were a couple of other new notable announcements today including the G10 and a couple of other new high end prosumer cameras, the SX1 IS and the SX10 IS. The only feature separating those latter two is the SX1's Digic 4 powered HD video mode.

This was a shorter and more conservative affair than the previous couple of Canon launch events but all the main features were in place. Coffee and sausage butties on arrival - check. Short presentation starting with sales figures and ending with the big announcements - check. Hands-on demo area where we get to play with the new gear - check. They'd even laid on some birds of prey for us to take pictures of while trying out the new toys. Very nice.

There were a smattering of other products including a new Digital IXUS (Digital ELPH for you americans) but this was the 5Ds day. Check my next blog post for my first impressions on the 5D mkII. Mainly the G10 has a 5x optical zoom that goes wide up to 28mm and the SX1 and SX10 have a long 20x optical zoom. Out of the two I liked the G10 more because all the manual features like ISO, exposure compensation and so-on are on nice dials on top of the camera. It's like going back to an old film camera! And it'll shoot RAW too.