Canon 40D or Sony A350?

I have a bunch of old Minolta lenses that have been sitting in the closet for years. I have the opportunity to get a Sony A350 body for $500 so thought I would jump on it so I could play around with my old lenses.

I'm not sure if I'm throwing good money at bad money though. On one hand, I'm torn because I'm thinking it's such a waste to have all those old Minolta lenses sitting in the closet. On the other hand, I think those old lenses are a sunk cost and that I should just move on and spend the money on another Canon body like the 40D.

I'm thinking I could give the Sony to my wife or parents to use or just keep it around the house to play around. I could also get a 40D or XSi for my wife and just let her share my Canon lenses.

Does anyone have any experience with the Sony bodies? I tried to look up some reviews and couldn't find too much. I know it uses a CCD instead of CMOS (not sure if that makes a big difference) and the viewfinder is apparently quite dim.

I played with one in the Sony Store once. I can tell you I wasn't terribly impressed. Of course, I wasn't really interested in buying it - I just wanted to see what the hype was about. Personally, I'd give it a pass unless you can use it for a while to see how it works for your wife or parents.

Bear in mind, your old Minolta lenses may not have auto focus capability and may be all manually driven... With todays AF systems and the capability they provide in a lens' performance, even if I were in your boat, I would probably abandon the old lenses (sell them on ebay if the need be) and start into a system (Canon, Nikon, or whatever) and get lenses with AF capability... If your Minolta lenses can autofocus than maybe the Sony system may be the choice for you... Obviously though, only you know how much you wanna throw into your photography system and whether or not you'd be happy with all these lenses that can't autofocus...

Just some points to consider...

I took one of my old lenses to Future Shop today and it did indeed work with the Sony AF system. I didn't have that much time to fiddle with it, but I'm not going to rule it out. $500 for a body seems too good to pass up.

Sell the old lenses since they still AF etc, surely not to much point in having 2 systems in the house unless one offers something unique over the other.