Impressions on the CANON EOS 30D : finally mature, but still expensive
Pros:
Many features and very low noise, APS-sized CMOS gives best result with reasonable priced lenses
Cons:
viewfinder a bit dark, 8 million pixels and APS-sized cmos is insufficient for studio-work.
The Bottom Line:
Unless you are making prints of over A3 size, i think this camera is marvelous. Together with the
17-85 mm stabilized zoom, it is sheer unbeatable.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Having used a 300D and a 10D, i hesitated a lot before getting hands on this camera.
I got it with a Canon f4.0-f5.6/17-85 EF-S IS zoom, found it in Sim Lim square in Singapore.
Improvements are not so important: the good things of the 20D are still there: very good image quality with its 8,2 megapixel cmos, and very useful high iso shooting without too much noise: perfect upto iso 400, still useful above.
The details of the descriptions in the 20D reviews are true for this model too.
Main differences: the lcd screen is bigger and better visible in sunlight.
The camera has a very quick start-up time: i measured about one tenth of a second !
Reaction on shutter-release is instantly of course. It can shoot at 5 images per second
Finally, Canon decided to offer us real spot-metering... So easy to do this on a digital camera, that it is a shame that they did not do this on the 20D. However...it would be even better to have
A real measuring of the whole image and tweaking images later on your computer. Unfortunately, this is at this moment not possible with dslr camera’s, for the same reason it is impossible to use the lcd screen as a finder: the light-path does not reach the cmos chip until you make the picture.
The camera can shoot in jpeg or raw, or both together, it has a USB2 connection, and the ISO goes from 100 to 3200 (in automatic mode: 100-400)
Things that are still not so good: the view-finder is not very bright, and it is hard to focus in low light manually.
Although it still is having slightly lower resolution than the 5D, i felt that the smaller chipsize has a very big advantage: most lenses show noticeable chromatic aberration when used with the 5D, this camera picks up the center of the image circle of the lenses, which is mainly free from this aberration.
For real professional use, i think the Nikon full size camera’s are still unbeatable, but for normal, let’s say “semi-professional” use, this 30D is very hard to beat, especially for its price.
The f4.0-f5.6/17-85 EF-S IS lens is doing a nice job, the same is not true for the smaller brother: i feel that the 18-55 mm non-stabilized lens will be replaced by most users after some time, because of its limits in focal length, and it’s limit as a “good weather lens”.
Just try to imagine: to outperform this camera with a 5D, you would need a 28-135 mm stabilized lens.
And you would see lot’s of chromatic aberration with such a zoom on a 24x36 mm Cmos.
Unless you are making prints of over A3 size, i think this camera is marvelous. Together with the 17-85 mm stabilized zoom, it is sheer unbeatable... at this moment.
