New Rebel to be sold as $700 kit

Canon sweetened the compact digital SLR market today for point-and-shoot fence sitters with a new addition to its digital Rebel line that's expected to be sold next month at $699.99 with an EF-S 18-55 millimeter, F/3.5-5.6 IS lens.

Weighing in at less than a pound, the new EOS Rebel XS has an APS-C CMOS sensor with 10.1 megapixels and is built around the company's high-performance DIGIC III image processor. Canon's hardware and software dust removal technology has also been incorporated into the unit.

The DSC, which will be available in both black and silver, also has a Live View mode for shooting images directly from its 2.5-inch LCD and a continuous JPEG burst rate of three frames a second that's limited only by the size of the memory card in the camera.

In addition, Canon announced a new external flash, the Speedlite 430EX II ($329.99), which it says takes 20% less time to recycle than its predecessor and whose settings can be controlled from the LCD of the camera that it's attached to.

"We are proud to introduce the new EOS Rebel XS camera at a very exciting time in digital imaging," Senior Vice President and General Manager for Canon's US Consumer Imaging Group Yuichi Ishizuka said in a statement. "As consumers have fully embraced digital photography, with many consumers purchasing their second or third digital camera models, we see the Rebel XS as the bridge to help photographers crossover from the world of point-and-shoot cameras to digital SLR technology."