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Yea, I got lenses for Canon SLR’s that won’t work on my AF body. And my Élan 7E was a great body. Whisper quiet shutter/motor drive, and an eye sensor in the viewfinder that would focus the exposure sensor where you were looking. I had that body about 2 years before I got my EOS 20D. It’s weird, the shutter system on the digital is noisier than the 7E. I can’t fathom why.

"I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad, and the computer can no longer read the files, so I have lost several years worth of photos."

Everyting I've placed on CDs in the last 10 years is gone. We will regret the passing of Kodachrome. Digital photography is wonderful, but it has one major drawback. It's useless for archival photo records. Take a photo with Kodachrome. Toss the slide into a storage box, and forget about it. Rediscover it in 30 years, and it will look like the day you took it. Do that with a digital image placed on a storage device. Come back in 30 years. It won't be there.

Canon went all out to make the shutter, mirror, and film drive on the Elan II and 7E quiet. For example, they eliminated much of the noise in the film transport by replacing most of the gears with an elastomeric toothed belt.

Digital SLRs have the same issues with the shutter and mirror (although not, of course, the film drive) as film SLRs. And the vertical travelling shutter that all makers use now is very similar to the ones used on the last generations of film cameras like the Elans.

Current Canon DSLRs have shutter/mirror mechanisms with various noise levels. It’s a function of how fast they decide to make the blades move (which determines the maximum flash sync speed), how long-lived they intend the shutter to be, and how quickly they decide the particular camera model should respond to the shutter press and return to reflex viewing.

Some Canon digital EOSes are quieter than others, and it’s hard to predict it on the basis price or intended level of user. If they haven’t pulled the shutter/mirror quieting tricks they did on the later Elan models, I’m not sure why.

It is true that they have incorporated certain features that can be used, or are intended, for special situations requiring quiet operation, such as live view and delayed mirror drop.

[[Canon FX,FTBn -> Olympus 2n’s -> Canon EOS Rebel XT, EOS 3 -> Canon EOS Rebel XT -> Canon EOS 50D]]

“It’s weird, the shutter system on the digital is noisier than the 7E. I can’t fathom why.”

So you can tell the photo has been taken. My little Samsung Digimax L60 allows you to turn the shutter sound off. There is no NEED for a shutter, and no actual sound, they just put it there so people wouldn't gripe about not being able to tell when their photo had been captured.

Bit of trivia: for years, SLR’s weren't allowed in courtrooms. You had to have something no louder than the shutter on Leica’s rangefinder cameras to avoid disturbing the court.