High quality and features (High price too)

This is my first digital SLR and I am very happy with its performance so far. It is a great mix of point and shoot ease with the full featured needs of an enthusiast or a semi-pro.

Ease of Use:

This camera is as easy or as complicated as you want it to be. The preset and automatic functions like ‘portrait’ for close ups with a blurry background, ‘sports’ for multiple exposures (5/sec. or 3/sec.), ‘landscape’, ‘night time’ and ‘macro’ all work well without any programming, really a point and shoot affair. For the beginning user these functions provide the basics for some nice photos.

The menus are a little cumbersome. If you have ever owned a canon ‘Powershot’ series (I have a G2) then some of the menu features will be familiar to you. The LCD display on the top of the camera has most of the information you will need as you utilize the manual features. It takes some getting used to (they are navigable through a button push and two scrolling wheels) since it is not immediately intuitive which wheel does what. Though once you have manipulated your ISO or aperture or exposure you will become accustomed to it and realize that using the wheels lets you toggle your choices much faster than multiple presses of a button.

Luckily, the camera comes well suited (though you will likely want to adjust the sharpness) right out of the box. So deep trips into the menus are rare.

The LCD screen is ample. At over 2 inches it has enough pixels to get a good idea of the quality of your last snap. The buttons to zoom the LCD are positioned for easy thumb use and get up to about 9x. This is plenty of resolution to check fine focus and look for other anomalies that you want to find before you get back to your PC.

Overall the ease of use is dependent upon your ability. The menus are straightforward once you find where the settings are hiding. The automatic features are truly point and shoot. The manual features are going to be pretty familiar to anyone who has used a canon with manual options, but will take some time for someone new to Canon or D-SLRs.

Durability:

The body on this unit is magnesium. It is suitably rigid and feels good in the hands. I have kind of short stubby fingers, so I was glad to see that the buttons were well positioned, out of the way, and I have yet to accidentally push one. The camera is heavy enough with the lens provided to feel stable in your hands. The rubberized grip feels good in your hands and even on a hot day with a little sweat my grip was firm and reliable. Canon also upgraded the shutter durability on this model, though time will tell how well that was executed. Overall with all the metal, nothing on this camera feels flimsy or cheap.

Battery life:

I have had my camera for just over a week now and taken about 400 pictures, my battery went to one bar just today. Luckily the included charger is a stand-alone version so I can charge a battery while still using the camera. I have other canon products that use the same battery so I have several sitting around. I have not used the camera in cold conditions or extensively utilized the LCD, so the all around battery life is unknown. I would highly recommend that you get an extra battery, or even spring for the grip extension as you can use AA batteries in there in a pinch.

Photo Quality:

I have not seen many pictures up close and on my pc or in print from many other cameras of the same class, so I cannot offer a comparison. What I can say is that right out of the box this camera takes tack sharp images and the color saturation is great. The auto white balance does a respectable job in all light conditions but not indoors under bulbs. If you are doing any serious work here, use the custom white balance settings. I have printed several prints at 8x10 with 600 dpi from my HP 3310 printer and the quality is great. Even looking for imperfections I cannot find any. For fun I took a shot at ISO 100, 400 and 3200 (max) and compared them. There was no discernable noise at 100 or 400 and even the 3200 exposure was impressive there were some dark pixels but not as many as I thought I would see. It seems Canon has put a lot of thought into noise reduction. I do some astral photography through my telescope so low noise is really important for those long exposures. The flash does a good job and is high enough off the camera body to not interfere with the lenses, even my 70mm-300mm did not cast a shadow (though it did when extended all the way).

The included EF-S 18mm-55mm does a good job as an all around lens. It is not an incredibly fast lens (at f/4) but for most situations it is fine. The focus is fast and quiet. The quality of the glass is what you would expect from a $200 lens.

Shutter lag:

This thing starts up before I can even get the lens cap off. I timed it and came up with about .22 seconds on average (the box says .15) so maybe it is just a reaction time thing. The auto focus on the EF-S lens is pretty fast. I would say on average (as long as it is smart enough to get the right zone in focus –I found about 60-70% it is close enough) it took around half a second to be ready to shoot. If you are using the manual focusing it really can take a picture as fast as you press the button or if you are using the multiple exposure setting, it really does get about 5 per second, using the highest quality JPEG. It slows down to about 1 per second if you are using the RAW or JPEG+RAW settings. I like that it will capture a JPEG and a RAW of the same image simultaneously. I have taken as many as 30 full resolution JPEGs without stopping at 5 per second (with fixed focus). Aside for the ever so slight start up time, there is no discernable shutter lag, at least to me.

Some Technical specs on image download speeds:

195 full resolution Jpegs (Avg. 3.4 MB each)

1:45 seconds via included USB 2.0 cable
:50 seconds via card in CF slot on computer
Sandisk ultra II 2.0 GB type I CF card

I will update this review as I get more use out of this camera. So far I am very pleased with the purchase.