While I have not seen the first problem, having just shot about 5500 frames for Extreme Makeover Home Edition, about 1/8 of which probably had the sun IN the frame, we did recently send a body back to Canon with significant softness and noise banding issues. The quality coming out of this body was fairly poor, so I doubt a firmware update would have fixed the issues with it, but it does make you wonder how much of the image quality issues you see with first-run cameras pertain to the hardware itself or the software running that hardware. All of the bodies I have personally used seem to be fine, even pre-update.