Canon Rebel XT / EOS 350D review

Market segment for entry-level well priced digital SLRs has really heated up recently. And "entry-level" doesn't mean "bad" or "lacking on features and performance". Pentax, Olympus, Nikon and Canon all had good contenders there. Then Canon went ahead and threw their new 8 megapixel Rebel XT /EOS 350D (as it's called in Europe) into the playground. This camera shares many features with it's more potent older brother Canon 20D while being really small and light and comes with a sub $1000 pricetag (body and kit-lens).



First impression

I should be used to really small and light SLRs in this price-range but Rebel XT / 350D (link to Amazon.com) still managed to surprise me. Female snappers will be especially pleased but for my average sized hands the body felt even too small. Grip is actually held only by two fingers as index finger is on shutter release and small finger has nothing to hold on to. Lightweight body is of course bonus whenever you have to lug it around over your shoulder.

Turn-on time and waking from stand-by is almost nonexistant, clearly something inherited from Canon EOS 20D. Battery life is also impressive - I didn't manage to get it empty after 4 days of shooting even though I used LCD a lot.



Body and usability

Working area of right-hand thumb is really busy with buttons - exposure lock, focus point selection, exposure compensation, shooting mode selection (single frame, continuous, timer) and LCD light button all sit there. In addition to that you have navigation buttons which turn into ISO, focusing mode selection, exposure mode selection and white balance selection buttons during taking the picture.

All this button frenzhy going on I found myself occasionally unintentionally pressing (or they got pushed when putting into my camerabag or taking out) shooting mode button and turning dioptric correction wheel next to viewfinder. It truns way too easily.



On the back there are actually two screens (already familiar from Rebel /EOS 300D) - above 1.8 inch color-LCD there's black-and-white information screen that shows most important shooting information in nice large font. It doesn't really work for candid shooting from the "hip" as you're requred to turn your camera to check aperture and shutter speed.

Tripodmount and lensmount are both made of steel which is a bonus. Then again - I've never heard of anyone breaking their plastic mount...

Focusing

From all cameras that I've tested in this price/feature range Rebel XT / 350D is hands down winner in focusing speed. Nothing more to say here really - focusing is really fast and focus lock very firm, no hunting around.



One strange thing I found though - when shooting in dimmer situations then on aperture mode camera focuses fine. If I switched it to night portrait mode then flash pops up (as expected) and camera does a strobe flash for focusing aid. In the end it takes much more time and I have always found strobe flash very akward solution.

Shooting speeds

Shutter speeds range from 1/4000 to 30 seconds + bulb. Maximum shooting speed is 3 frames per second and maximum 14 frames in one burst in JPG format or 5 frames in RAW+JPG format. After that camera slows down to clear buffer but continues as soon as there enough free space. Strangely enough I never managed to hit the roof when shooting JPG. It just kept on snapping and snapping. I was using the fastest CF card by Lexar but it's really strange. In a good way.

Color display and viewfinder

Color display is probably the biggest let down in 350D. Even with cloudy weather it is too dark and on sunny days completely useless. Turing up the brightness helps only very little - truly weak performance from Canon.

As all cheaper digital SLRs 350D has somewhat small and dim viewfinder but not horribly so and it's possible to focus manually in darker conditions as well.



Picture quality

In my Canon EOS 20D review I complained about really crappy kit-lens. Apparently Canon has some quality control issues here as the same kit-lens on my test 350D was considerably better. No rainbows around bright light sources and overall better image quality. Manual focus ring was still moving enough to make manual focusing a pain.

Picture quality wise 350D is no worse than it's older brother 20D. They both use same DIGIC II imaging processor which keeps noise well under control even at ISO 800 and only on ISO 1600 it becomes really visible on computer screen.

White balance is good in normal situations but similarily to 20D turns out too reddish photos that are taken indoors. You can avoid this problem by shooting RAW+JPG at the same time and do some post processing later in your computer.

Software

I've never really written about software that comes with digital cameras before as I've never used it before. I just copy images to my computer and use iView Media Pro for managing and Photoshop for editing. But as I didn't have new Photoshop CS2 I couldn't convert RAW images with it. So I was forced to try out Canon own software. Oh boy. Canon might be on eof the best camera companies out there but it certainly turns out crappy software. Slow and really unusable. It took me several minutes to find out how to do raw-conversion.

I'd seriously think about giving a try to free converter from www.pixmantec.com.

What's in the CON list?

I already mentioned the too dark display. If you have large hands it could be too small a camera for you (vertical grip might help here). Another, perhaps minor but nevertheless, minus is the fact that if you open CF card door while pictures are being written from camera memory to the card this is cancelled and you will lose unwritten images. I imagine it would be really easy fix to show a warning on display not to take out the card and keep writing data.

Conclusion

A week with new 8 megapixel Canon Rebel XT / EOS 350D convinced me that it's really a tremendous camera for beginner and as a spare body for professional shooter alike. Handling, responsiveness, shooting speed and picture quality - this camera offers some serious competition to larger, heavier and more expensive cameras.