Canon Digital Rebel T1i (EOS 500D) Review by Ken Rockwell – Ken, on the JPEG image quality:
To the educated observer, this makes the Rebel T1i images look as if they came from a point-and-shoot, with their need for severe noise reduction even at daylight ISOs.
This makes T1i images look slightly weird because the edges are all sharp, but distant bushes will have no texture, similar to cartoons. If you have grass and bushes receding into the distance, the close ones will show all the branches, and as they get farther away, suddenly all the details inside the bushes get smoothed over so they become green blobs, not bushes. Don't freak out; this is a subtle effect, but annoying once you learn to recognize it. Dealing with raw files instead of image files (JPG) may let you rectify this later in software; my life is too valuable to waste playing with raw files.