This article was written in December 2003, by Matthew Dillon dillon at backplane.com.

Note: this is a review of the Canon 10D but most of it also applies to the lower-cost Canon 300D. The 300D has fewer firmware features and you should read a comprehensive review/comparison of the two to understand the differences.

I love digital photography, but not wanting to spend gobs of money on cameras and lens only to see them go obsolete too quickly I pretty much stuck to point-and-shoots like the G2. The technology was advancing steadily and I knew truely significant advances were on the 1-3 year horizon as early as the G1, so I bided my time and waited.

Well, I have not been disappointed. Canon came out with the 1Ds which met all of my sensor sensitivity, noise, latency requirements, but was still too expensive. But the writing was on the wall and I decided to wait just a little but longer. Then Canon came out with the EOS-10D which met all of my requirements PLUS it also looked like Canon had settled on a Lens series (the EF series for EOS cameras) and I decided to take the plunge.

I was a little worried about early reviews complaining about soft AF focus, but after reading a lot of reviews I put it down to inexperienced photographers moving from point-and-shoot back into [D]SLR's. The more experienced photographers didn't seem to have a problem and the very few experienced photographers that complained seem to have simply gotten lemon calibrations, which Canon will happily fix. I wasn't wrong, there are *NO* focusing issues with this camera as long as you know how to use it.

Then came lenses. Since my last investment was a G2 I decided I could splurge a bit and got the Canon EF 28-135 IS USM lens. Boy, what a mouthful! I especially wanted the image stabilization because there were simply too many situations with the G2 where I had blur from camera shake simply trying to take shots at 1/20 second in low-light situations (remember with the G2 you pretty much had to use ISO 50 to avoid noise). I wanted USM and Servo focusing to be able to catch objects moving quickly towards me, such as skiing-with-friends shots (which I haven't had a chance to do yet so no pics, sorry!).

I also wanted a long lens so I got the Tokina ATX 80-400mm telephoto.

I am not a good judge of 'softness' per-say, but since neither lens is cosidered to be an ultra-high-end lens I can say with confidence that both are soft at the edges... wide open and at max zoom. At 6 Mpixels (the 10D) you can just see it on a PC but you can't really see it on prints. The Canon lens is incredible. The IS works great, and the AF is very fast. The Tokina works well but it does not have IS and the 1/f rule for shutter speed applies big time, maybe even 2x big-time. The AF is fairly slow and noisy but it does work.

Both of these lens are fairly slow. The Canon runs F3.5-5.6 wide open and the Tokina runs F4.5-5.6 wide open, but the image stabilization makes up for a lot. Still, when I buy my third lens I am going to go for an F2.8 or F1.8 prime lens.

[Update 26 Dec 2003] I finally got a wide angle prime lens, the Sigma 20mm F1.8 EX DG. This lens is billed as an F1.8 lens but the output quality is unusable at anything less then F2.8. Still, the output quality is truely exceptional in the F4.0-F13 range so I decided it was a keeper, and since it focuses to within a few inches of the front of the lens it takes excellent macro shots. I recommend this lens for macro, daylight, and flash shots, but use Av mode when possible to set the F-stop to at least F4.0 if you want sharp results. This is especially true when taking nightime flash shots (e.g. coupled with setting the custom function on the 10D which overrides the flash sync in Av mode and sets it to 1/200).

Canon has the lowest-noise sensor in the business. You can take pictures at ISO-200 with no appreciable noise, even when you look at the picture on a computer monitor. For daylight photos at faster shutter speeds you can take pictures at ISO-400 without any appreciable noise on the prints, though the noise is certainly obvious on a monitor.

In low-light situations where you simply cannot use a flash you can use ISO-800 and ISO-1600 and while a lot of noise is visible, it is better then having too much motion blur. Still, you will have to down-sample or blur the results and/or make smaller prints if you do not want the noise to be visible on your prints. An ISO-3200 mode exists too.

For long low-light exposures you should always use ISO-100 or ISO-200 (100 preferred), even though this quadruples exposure times over ISO-400. At ISO-100 you can take a 5 minute exposure without introducing any appreciable noise. Canon not only has the best noise-reduction firmware in-camera (and which also does not require dark-frame subtraction), but at ISO-100 it has the lowest-noise CMOS sensor in the business short of spending $10K on a digital camera back for a medium format camera.

Also note that the 10D has a cool mirror-lockup feature which when combined with self-timer mode will give you 2 seconds to press the shutter release and move your hand away from the camera and freeze in order to not jostle it when taking very long exposures. It is an invaluable feature.

The Canon 28-135mm IS USM Lens has image stabilization. It's a good idea to give the camera a second or two to stabilize the frame (shutter half depressed) when IS is turned on and your shutter speed is 1/30sec or slower. At faster shutter speeds you don't really have to wait for it stabilize, it will still work properly. At slower speeds IS will completely get rid of 'camera shake', but IS does not work properly if you go slower then around a 0.5 second exposure because the IS *WILL* drift slowly, even if the camera is on a tripod.

So, turn off IS if you are taking very long 0.5 second or slower exposures and also turn off IS if you are taking 1/8 second or slower exposures with a tripod. For most other situations you can leave IS turned on, and always leave IS on for hand-held shots even if they are long exposures. For example, if you are taking a 2 second exposure with the camera hand-held, IS will do a better job then your hand will.

IS does not help you when you are taking shots of moving targets... that is, if the camera itself is in motion. Well, that's not true... it will help you, just not all that much, and the picture in the viewfinder will be jumpy. If you are moving the camera a lot, turn off IS.

The Canon takes compact flash. I highly recommend getting a 512M or 1G CF card. I do not recommend getting a microdrive. The camera will take it, but microdrives eat more power and are far more fragile then flash. Flash has gotten a whole lot faster in the last few years and transfer rates are comparable. The EOS 10D has a 9-frame buffer which should be plenty.

Generally speaking you set the camera to produce either RAW or maximum resolution, maximum quality JPEGs. Most 10D users should just use JPEG mode. RAW requires a considerable amount of post processing and Canon's in-camera JPEG generation code is extremely good, far better then any other camera IMHO (but read a professional review for the reality :-)).

The EOS-1Ds has a full-frame 35mm sensor. It's big and expensive. The EOS-10D's sensor is 1.6 times smaller and crops the image supplied by the lens. Note that the viewfinder does this too so WYSIWYG still applies. But this means that my 28-135mm zoom is actually producing output equivalent to 44-216mm, and my 80-400mm telephoto is actually producing output equivalent to 128-640mm.

I have to say, this is *cool*. You might hear some people pooh-pooh it but the fact remains that I am getting a 640mm equivalent photo into a 6 Mpixel Jpeg file which has an equivalent pixel resolution to what a 9 Mpixel camera would get with a full-frame sensor. It is true that the same shot with a 640mm lens and a full-frame CMOS sensor would get more light, but I am NOT complaining!

However, remember that the 1/f rule applies whenever you are using a zoom or telephoto lens. If you are zoomed into, ah, a 640mm equivalent, then your shutter speed should be at least 1/640 or you will get camera shake, even on a tripod. Also, focus is usually softer when a lens is either wide-open or zoomed all the way in.

As a general rule of thumb you want to stop the lens down a bit so it is not wide-open and use a fast enough shutter speed. Most blurred shots are due to hand shake and too slow a shutter speed! Having an IS lens helps a lot, allowing you to take shots two stops slower then you would normally take them (for a non-moving subject!). A very common mistake is to sacrifice shutter speed in order to take shots at lower ISO speeds. A little sacrifice may work, but until you get a feel for the camera you should either error on the side of shutter speed or you should take shots at several ISO settings (I wish the 10D had an ISO-bracketing feature! It would be far more useful then the WB bracketing feature!).

The built-in flash has plenty of power but it doesn't pop far enough up so RedEye is a problem as well as lens and/or hand interference. Just get into the habit of messing with the zoom from the bottom. If you are a serious flash user you will want to get a Canon EX series Flash anyway. The EOS-300D flash is higher but don't make a purchase decision based on that because although the 300D has the same sensor and in-camera processing chip, it is missing a number of the 10D's features, so it depends on your price point and whether you need the missing features or not. It took a while to learn how to use the flash, and my subjects are still often over-exposed at close ranges. Fortunately the 10D has flash exposure compensation and can also do some pretty neat things in (Av) mode with the flash. Learning to use the flash was one of the few things I really spent time reading the manual to get right.