Canon Rebel XT vs T5

I decided to upgrade my camera! I love my Rebel XT, don’t get me wrong. I have taken some great pictures with it.  It has done everything I’ve wanted it to do in a camera.  But I wanted more.  If I won the lottery, I would buy a $5,000 camera, but until then, my price range for a camera is $500.  I’ve always wanted a 75-300 mm lens, so when I saw a T5 bundle with that lens, among other things, for just a little over $500, I bought it.  I would love to have bought the T6i, but it was more than what I wanted to pay.  I talked myself into buying the T5 ONLY if I sold my XT, so that the new camera wouldn’t cost as much.

So . . . when the new camera arrived, of course I wanted to test it out to see how much “better” it was next to my trusty XT.  The biggest difference between the XT and T5 is the megapixels (8 vs 16), which means better quality; and the maximum iso (1600 vs 6400), which means you can take pictures in lower light with a higher shutter speed.  No more blurred pictures in low light!

The set up:

I set a doll on a chair on my dining room table.  I took pictures with the lights on and the window curtains open to bring in some natural lighting.  The second set of pictures are with the lights off and curtains closed. Both cameras are on a tripod and I used a timer to avoid camera shake.  The one on the left is my XT. The one on the right is T5.

(Taken with my iphone.)
Here are the results:

	Good Lighting
	XT	T5
Auto, flash
Auto, no flash
Portrait, flash
Landscape, no flash
Closeup, XT automatically turned on flash, 5T did not turn on flash
Sports, no flash
Night Portrait, flash
	Poor Lighting
Auto, flash
Auto, no flash
Program, no flash, iso 100
iso 200
iso 400
iso 800
iso 1600	not available
iso 3200	not available
iso 6400	not available

*Just a little note about the focal length; I meant to have them both at 55mm, but I cleaned the lenses while they were on the tripod and accidentally moved the length on the XT to 49mm.  That is why the photos on the T5 look closer.
**All photos were taken with the LARGE setting (3456x2304 for the XT, and 5184x3456 with the T5)
It is difficult to tell much of a difference in these photos because they are small, but when you zoom in to the actual pixel size, there is a difference.
Using the photos from the Program mode, with 800 iso, here is a closeup of each:
T5:


XT:

This one is smaller because it has less pixels. It looks blurry compared to the T5.
The T5 has a super low quality rating, so I can only imagine how much better a $5,000 camera is. Someday . . .