[acropolite (Phil)]

Handheld, unfortunately I can't do a direct comparison as I no longer have the 50D. There may be some disadvantage at the 24mm end I expect the 24-105 will perform better at 40mm, but the difference in resolution and clarity is really apparent. When I did a similar comparison between the 20D and 50D the difference was barely noticeable.

I found the 50D/20D comparison, the 50D is to the left. s you can see the difference is barely noticeable. From memory the images are greater than 100% magnification and the 50D image has been scaled to match the size of the 20D. It's apparent that there's a touch more detail in the 50D crop but not much. It's been speculated that current lens technology isn't up to the pixel density of the 50D sensor.

FWIW Pixel size is 6.4uM in the 5D II, the same size as the 20D, the 50D's pixels are a much smaller at 4.7uM