Me and the Lady have just spent a long weekend in Beijing, and I have had the opportunity to use a friend’s newly bought Canon 500D. It’s compact and very light. The camera is snappy and the built-in flash works rather well as fill-in in standard program mode. Nice.
The only complaint I can think of is the cheap kit lens. The Nikon counterpart, which is another cheap kit lens, is AFS and therefore supports full-time manual. Full-time manual makes the whole system so much easier to use, and is well worth it.