BEAR!
I agree that the rebel line of bodies leaves much to be desired, but I'm not sure that your sig.other will gain that much from going all the way up to a 7Ne.
I'm a real fan of the EOS elan series.
The used price of an elan 7Ne is substantially more than say, its most similar sister, the elan IIe.
Unless she is going to be doing alot of astrophotography, or sports photojournalism, I just don't see the improvement to her of very slight and gradual improvements like the mirror lockup, or the 4 frames per second, instead of the 2.5.
The thing is, however, the used camera prices for the elan IIe v.s. the Elan 7e are going to be substantial, just because the elan IIe was around much longer and sold substantially more units. The elan II was a spectacular success, and now being sold in massive numbers on the used market, has driven the prices down. You can easily buy an elan II for 60-100, and an elan IIe for eye controlled autofocus will be a longer wait on
ebay, but shouldn't hit you over 150. I bought mine, body only, for my GF, for $47 dollars plus shipping, plus it was one with the datemarker back (I'm not kidding).
I own and have put alot of film through my elan II, and I'm not sure the eye controlled autofocus is worth the extra money, and possibility of error. Frankly, with the elan II's, I'm astounded at what you can get for mere pesos.
I do recommend though, that you take the extra money you save on the body, and put it into a lens.
If you spend the 300 bucks or so, for an f1.4 50mm
prime with the fast ultrasonic motor, and then you won't NEED faster less grainy film. Even an 80 dollar plastic fantastic f1.8 50mm prime would do, although beginners get annoyed when autofocus doesn't work right in low light levels, and I don't want to recommend anything that would annoy your woman, as that could make her take less pictures, and be less likely to enjoy photography enough to get better at it.
Regardless, with a normal
prime (50mm-no zoom), She will easily be able to take pictures in natural light, handheld,
WITHOUT FLASH, which is the single largest reason most peoples terrible snapshots, look like terrible snapshots.
With a 50mm prime, what she see's is what she will get and she'll suddenly be getting photo's that are ten times better, and will hopefully then use her camera ten times as much.
I hate the f4.5-f5.6 kit zoom idea. Zoom is a great selling point in marketing, but the small aperture, makes indoor shooting without a flash impossible without a tripod. Zoom lenses, are generally so slow, and so bad, that it's just not worth it. The "zoom" feature makes far too many comprimises optically speaking to make a good lens.
Professionals are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get zoom lenses that only get into the same neighborhood (in terms of optical quality and speed) as prime lenses costing only several hundreds of dollars or a couple thousand at most. Are you? :er:
To put it this way, since f5.6 lets in four stops less light than f1.4, for your kit zoom to have the same shutter speed as a 300 dollar prime lens, it would have to use iso 1600 film instead of iso 100. If you used the cheaper 78 dollar f1.8 prime at f2, you'd still need iso 800 film instead of iso 100.
Usually, a faster lens is better than faster film, and a reasonably cheap prime lens will almost always dominate, in image quality and speed, an expensive zoom.
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