Cameras SLR : Canon EOS 500D Rebel T1i - Digital SLR Cameras

Executive Summary about : Cameras SLR  By Shawn Barnett and Alexandra Savvides

Canon’s new flagship consumer SLR, the Rebel T1i, gathers the best from its more expensive brethren into a more affordable, compact package. The Rebel T1i now sports a 15.1-megapixel sensor like the EOS 50D, and records HD video like the 5D Mark II.

canon eos cameras

Now at the top of the Rebel line, the Canon T1i takes on the Nikon D90, with its video mode, while the XS and XSi are left to challenge the Nikon D40 and D60. With the Rebel T1i, Canon is answering the pincer move that Nikon’s put on it in the past few years, now matching them model-to-model at the low end, because the XS and XSi will remain in the lineup.

The prospect of capturing video with a wide array of lenses, from super-wide-angle to long telephoto is what makes capturing video with Canon Rebel T1i interesting. Before now, you’d have to save a pile of cash and join the long waiting-lists at camera retailers to get a Canon 5D Mark II to explore these new video features, but the availability of the Rebel T1i should shorten those lines for many aspiring videographers.

Design

The 500D has that typical look-and-feel that is characteristic of all the Canon consumer dSLRs - there’s the black plastic casing, along with smooth black buttons and a new 3-inch LCD screen. Filled with 920,000 dots, the screen’s brightness and resolution is just great for a camera of its class. It is a joy to use, and ideal for partnering with the movie mode and Live View.

cameras digital slr

The chrome-tipped mode dial makes yet another appearance, housing the usual shooting modes, Creative Auto and movie mode. At the top, a hotshoe sits with the pop-up flash, an over-zealous little beast that loves to spring into action whenever you venture into automatic mode. (Credit: Canon)

It’s also quite lightweight, at 480g without lens or battery, which makes it easy to carry around for impromptu shooting.

Features

To activate the recording, you move the dial to movie mode or Live View and then hit the record button. Auto focus is available before and during recording by pressing the * button, though do note that you will be able to hear all the lens movements in the audio recording - and trust us, they are loud.

The focus points also blink a little too briefly when it’s locked onto a subject.

Canon’s implementation is slightly better, though it can still be tricked by resting the camera too close to your body as you adjust settings.

Performance

Overall the 500D was nice and responsive in all shooting situations. With the kit lens (18-55mm), shooting in low-light situations was easy enough when using autofocus; though again, thanks to the difficult magnification of the viewfinder, manual focus became difficult to determine.

Using a standard SD card we managed to get 40 frames from the 500D before the camera produced a noticeable display whilst buffering and writing to the card. Canon quotes a shooting speed of 3.4 frames per second and a start-up of 0.1 second for the camera, and in practical use these figures hold up.

Image quality

We tested the 500D with the 18-55mm and 55-250mm kit lenses that retail for AU$1999 as a package. Canon’s typical natural level of colour saturation is present throughout all the images, and exposures are generally accurate.

As you can see from the chart to the right, the 500D copes really well at higher ISO levels - compare the shot at ISO 100 and ISO 800, which are very similar at full magnification.

Conclusion

The 500D is a very capable camera that is ideal for someone who is just entering the world of digital SLRs. The inclusion of high-definition video adds even more appeal to the already good-looking package. It’s a pretty crowded market segment, with the Nikon D5000 and the Olympus E-620 also in the “not quite entry level”‘ dSLR space, but the 500D is a pretty strong contender and on specs alone is very appealing.

• Good: Nice and responsive to use | Superb LCD screen | Great photos | Kit lenses are mostly decent
• Bad: Viewfinder is small | Video quality is not that impressive | Autofocus in movie mode is loud

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Canon SLR Digital Cameras : Canon Launches EOS 5D Mark II - Digital SLR Camera Review

Executive Summary about : Canon SLR Digital Cameras By Jay Werfalli

After three years since the launch of the full-frame EOS 5D, Canon has finally set free its replacement, the EOS 5D Mark II. That brings the 5D Mark II inline with the current EOS 1Ds Mark III professional DSLR in terms of resolution, and sees it take quite a jump from the 12.8-megapixel full-frame sensor found in the original 5D and the 12.1-megapixel full-frame sensor found in Nikon’s D700 and D3 cameras.

canon slr digital cameras

The 5D Mark II also includes Canon’s EOS Integrated Cleaning System with a new “non-stick” flourine coating on the outermost low-pass filter to help remove/reduce the potential build-up of dust particles on the sensor. In the hand, the 5D Mark II feels solid and well balanced. It’s a massive improvement over the 5D’s 2.5in, 230k pixel LCD.

The 5D Mark II’s other key feature is Full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixel) video recording at 30fps, which should no doubt really appeal to those that see the convergence between camcorder and camera as a good thing.

The most tempting aspect of the 5D Mark II’s video recording potential is to marry interchangeable high-quality optics with a large low-noise sensor and the possibility to shoot video using extremely shallow depths of field, plus it offers contrast-based AF, too, while recording. Audio is captured in PCM format from either the mono mic built into the 5D Mark II or from an external mic plugged into the camera’s 3.5mm jack on the side.

Other features include Canon’s new 14-bit DiG!C 4 processor over the 5D’s Digic II, along with an increased continuous burst rate of 3.9fps (buffered to 310 jpeg/fine frames with a UDMA card, 78 frames with a typical CF card) compared with its predecessor’s 3fps. It has to be said that many of us were expecting a higher rate like Nikon’s D700 5fps (8fps with battery grip), or even the 5fps of the EOS 1Ds Mark III.

In comparison, the Nikon D700 and older D300 both feature 51 AF points. The EOS 5D Mark II (body only) is available from end of November 2008

New 24 mm Lens

Canon also timed the 5D Mark II’s launch with a new lens announcement: the EF 24mm f1.4L II USM - a fast L-series lens featuring aspherical and UD lens elements, and Canon’s weather and dust sealing.

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Canon SLR Digital Cameras : Canon EOS 1D Mark III Digital SLR Camera Review

Executive Summary about : Canon SLR Digital Cameras By Philip Ryan

canon slr digital cameras

The Canon EOS 1D Mark III is all about speed - quickly capturing great shots of fast-moving subjects in even the toughest circumstances.

Canon’s EOS 1D Mark III offers a luxurious cocktail of high-resolution, extremely low noise, blazingly fast burst shooting, abundant customisation, and a build quality and ergonomic design among the best you’ll find in today’s camera market.

If you’ve ever looked at the sideline of a major sporting event and seen a gaggle of huge white lenses, then you’ve witnessed Canon’s dominance in the sports shooting world. Add to that this camera’s amazingly low noise, high-end build quality, and vast custom-function menu, and you’ve got one of the hottest cameras to hit the market this year.

Design

It still has a built-in vertical grip, with duplicate shutter and control buttons, so you don’t lose functionality when changing grips. Menu and Info buttons move above the screen, while the playback button drops to below. The Select button from the Mark II N is now obsolete, thanks to the Mark III’s Set button, which is mounted in the middle of the large scroll wheel, much like the scroll wheels found on the EOS 30D and 5D.

Canon does place the exposure compensation button a little too far to the left, but since the large scroll wheel doubles as exposure compensation in Aperture- and Shutter-priority modes, it wasn’t a problem for me. Our biggest control complaint is that Canon didn’t clearly mark a hard button for white balance.

While the Mark II N used button combinations for bracketing, drive mode, and ISO, the only combo that remains in the Mark III is for bracketing. Drive mode gets doubled up with the AF button, with the two split between the small scroll wheel behind the shutter and the large wheel on the camera’s back.

If you’re the type that likes to change your focusing screen, you’ll like the fact that Canon offers 11 different kinds of optional focusing screens for the 1D Mark III. Like its predecessor and big sister 1Ds Mark II, the Mark III includes numerous rubber gaskets to keep dust and moisture out of the camera.

Features

At the heart of this camera you’ll find a newly developed 10.1-megapixel Canon CMOS sensor. Like all other 1D cameras to date, the sensor is APS-H-sized (28.1 X 18.7mm), which gives the Mark III a 1.3x focal-length multiplier.

Whenever you turn the camera on or off, the camera vibrates the IR-cut filter to shake away any dust that may have settled on it. To process the data from the sensor, the camera uses a pair of Canon’s Digic III processors, making it the first dual-processor camera that I’ve ever seen.

Instead of the 12-bit analog-to-digital converters found in Canon’s other cameras, the Mark III uses 14-bit converters, which theoretically allow for more tonal gradations than their 12-bit brethren. A dedicated AF processing unit drives the camera’s 45-point autofocus system, which includes 19 cross-type points. For comparison, both the EOS 5D and 30D sport only one cross-type point, while Canon’s 16.6MP 1Ds Mark II has a mere seven cross-type points. Cross-type AF points provide a higher level of sensitivity than standard points.

Exposure metering options are just as sophisticated as the AF system. The camera uses a 63-zone through-the-lens (TTL) metering system that offers full-frame evaluative metering, centre-weighted average, and partial and spot metering. Canon calls this last option “multispot metering.” In our field tests, the 1D Mark III yielded remarkably accurate exposures and was rarely fooled by tricky scenes, but the 3D colour Matrix Metering found in Nikon’s D2Xs — with its 1,005-pixel sensor and onboard database of comparison image data - barely  edges out the 1D Mark III’s system when it comes to very tricky situations. If you’re really worried about highlights, though, you can activate the Mark III’s Highlight Tone Priority custom function, which extends the upper portion of the dynamic range to help preserve highlight detail.

Including the one mentioned above, the Canon 1D Mark III has 57 custom functions. If you own a previous 1D series camera, don’t assume that the number-labels of specific custom functions will be the same on the 1D Mark III. Canon officially joins the live-view SLR revolution with the 1D Mark III, which lets you frame images with the big 3-inch LCD on the back of the camera instead of the optical viewfinder, should you choose to do so. Canon also warns that increased temperatures can lead to increased image noise.

As usual, along with this new SLR comes a new version of Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software for RAW processing. If you prefer to use Adobe’s Camera Raw plug-in with Photoshop, you may be as irked as we were to find out that Adobe forces you to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 or Photoshop Elements 5.0 if you want to use the latest update, which includes the 1D Mark III as well as Fuji’s FinePix S5 Pro, Nikon’s D40x, Olympus’ E-410 and SP-550 Ultra Zoom, and Sigma’s SD14.

Performance

When shooting Raw, the camera took 0.5 second between shots. Shutter lag measured 0.4 second in our high-contrast test, which mimics bright shooting conditions, and 1.1 seconds in our low-contrast test, which mimics dim shooting conditions.

Continuous Shooting basically lived up to Canon’s 10-frames-per-second claim. After a full weekend of shooting many hundreds of shots in Raw+JPG mode, the battery hadn’t even drained halfway. The charger that comes with the Mark III can charge up to two batteries at once, though only one battery comes with the camera.

Image Quality

Images shot with the Canon EOS 1D Mark III can be absolutely stunning. Colours look extremely accurate, and the automatic white balance does an excellent job of neutralising colours under a variety of lighting situations. If paired with a sharp lens, the 1D Mark III can produce images with a vast amount of fine detail.

• Good: Extremely fast, 10-megapixel continuous shooting | Very low noise | Highly customisable | Well-designed body with weather sealing | 3-inch LCD | Abundant optional accessories
• Bad: Heavy | May be a bit too large for people with small hands

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