How good is Canon’s new 550D with old, cheap lenses?

Pretty good (shot without tripod, a few days ago):

Using this 10-year-old lens (70-300, no image stabilising or anything fancy). I wondered if my old (pretty cheap) lenses from my film camera would work OK with a brand new digital camera. Yes, although I get a lot of chromatic aberration at wide apertures, sadly.

So far as I can tell (and dpreview.com seems to back this up), Canon is still the best manufacturer of digital cameras for low-light situations, bar none. Which covers an awful lot of the interesting photos out there. Although … in this image … the camera kept trying to expose for “space”, so even asking it to do a full -5 stops underexposure, the moon still whited-out. In the end, I had to go to fully manual (on Canon cameras, I’ve needed to do that fewer than 5 times in my life) and force each of: Exposure (1/200), Aperture f/9.0, ISO Speed 100. This is also the first time I can remember where I’ve “had” to manually change the ISO speed on a digital camera.