Just bought my 40D in Beijing, body only, for 8800RMB (www.xe.com/ucc for your local rates).

For me, it's an upgrade from the 300D, so you can imagine that it's quite a blessing so far.

Initial thoughts:

- Body is nice and chunky, I'd played with and nearly bought a 400D, but this feels a lot better

- High ISO noise is really amazing compared to 300D (no surprise there!), ISO1000 looks better than ISO400 on my old camera

- 6.5fps is obviously quite impressive, but what I really like is the massive buffer, I like taking panorama stitches, in manual RAW, but my 300D always took so long to clear the buffer that the light had changed (check my flickr account for examples)

- I'm slightly underwhelmed that Adobe Lightroom doesn't recognise the RAW files, so, for the first time ever, I actually had to use the software that came with the camera (and compared to Lightroom, it's not very brilliant)

- I need to get used to servo focus, tried it with a motorbike that was coming at me, but I somehow got the car behind it in focus

- Overall the focus is very speedy, on my Sigma 70-200 2.8 it's a dream, and I already thought it was quite acceptable on my 300D

- Haven't tested liveview yet (wasn't my main reason for buying anyway). Will report back once I have

- The display is AMAZING, I take a lot of photos on construction sites, and it's really brilliant to be able to immediately show the construction workers the photos on such a big screen (although I can't help but wish they'd put in an ultra highres one like on the new Nikons! oh well...)

- Playback is very quick, I can scroll through the 6.5fps shots like a cartoon, quite funny

- Shutter noise is different than my 300D, not sure if it's louder or quieter, will try to test later. It's definitely quieter than my friends' 20Ds

- This is probably not really big for people with current cameras, but instant-on is a dream- I've lost god knows how many opportunities with the 3 sec delay on my 300d!

Three examples (a few disclaimers: these are straight out of RAW conversion by DPP, I'm used to using Lightroom and didn't feel like learning this program):

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1173/1265709329_3b8bf18719.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1196/1266526518_aae75b2fa0.jpg

ISO1600:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1404/1266625648_3c6dcb797e.jpg

Many more shots here (and I'm still uploading):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dutchtom/

Overall I'm really pleased & ridiculously excited!!

Hope this helps...