A real camera

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fast, fast, fast. Excellent image quality. Easy to use controls. SLR.

Cons: Poor indoor white balance. Heft & bulk might be a negative to some.

The Bottom Line: 
If you want a "real" camera and want digital, seriously consider the 20D.

Author's Review
Once we got our Toshiba PDR-M700 digital point-and-shoot camera, most of our snapshots were taken on that. Digital photography is just too convenient to ignore. But I always missed the control I had with our older 35mm Canon Rebel. While the Toshiba takes fine pictures in most situations, it always felt a bit "toy-like" to me.

The 20D is nothing like that.

This is a solid, massive, camera that feels and performs like a "real" camera. It's heavier and larger than our old 35mm Rebel. With strap, 18-55mm "kit" lens, battery, and a memory card it weighs in at about 34oz! I really, really wanted the 17-85 IS USM zoom, but that lens is also noticeably heavy, and the combination was just a bit too much for my wife to be comfortable with. To re-iterate, this is not a light weight camera! Hopefully that means it is well put together and durable though.

But with the size comes performance. The 9-point autofocus works very well, even in relatively dim indoor light. If need be the flash will fire a quick strobe to assist, which is a bit startling the first time it happens. But in my experience, if there's enough light to comfortably read by, there will be enough light for the AF to work without the assist. And focus is fast, even in marginal light. With any other digital point and shoot I've tried, in such light they would hunt around and generally fail to lock focus. The 20D just locks on, pretty much immediately and the appropriate AF spots light up on the viewfinder to let you know where the camera is focusing, which I find handy.

Shot to shot speed is excellent, even recording RAW+JPEG. I can't imagine needing anything faster.

Battery life is at the very least acceptable--I've shot 301 pictures since the initial charge, with and without flash, and done all the normal fiddling you might do with a new camera and the battery meter has yet to indicate I'm to the half-way mark.

All the controls are very convenient, pretty much everything you'd probably want (including ISO) is a single button push and spinning of one of the two command dials. The only exception to this is the custom white balance adjustment. And unfortunately, the one major downfall of the camera is that it doesn't do a real good job with the white balance indoors (when not using the flash), at least in my house. The custom setting helped, but compared to all the other settings, it's a bit convoluted to set. Shooting in raw and fixing it after the fact also works well, but I'd prefer to get it right in the camera.

If you have Canon EF-S lenses, they should work with this camera, my 75-300 USM works fine as does the old 28-85 "kit" lens from my old Rebel. Unfortunately the 20D uses a new method of communicating with the flash unit, and so my Promaster FTD-7000M will not work with it. At all. Promaster says they're coming out with new flashes for the 20D and other Canons that use the new E-TTL II.

Surprisingly, the built-in flash is better than I expected. And it does pop up high enough to pretty much completely eliminate red-eye without having to turn on red-eye reduction. I've taken several shots of my two-year old with him looking directly at the camera with no red-eye at all.

The included 18-55 lens seems to be fine, but nothing too terribly exciting. For indoors, it's perfectly acceptable. For outdoors where you might more often want a longer lens, you'll probably want to consider an upgrade of some sort at some time. But there are a lot of EF-S lenses out there to choose from, which is one of the advantages of getting an SLR.

The software bundle is relatively nice, including Photoshop Elements, but 2.0, which is one version behind. The bundled Canon software is quite handy for handling those raw files, and does a good job at letting you change the camera settings after you've downloaded the pictures to the computer. I have not tried the capture or photostitch utilities. The software is slow to convert the raw images to jpegs though--several seconds per image.

Large JPG files are about 2-3MB, raw files about 7-8MB. If you shoot raw+large that's about 10MB per shot. Plan accordingly. This camera is so fast it will make you take more pictures than you might have otherwise. If you shoot in the programmed modes (e.g. "green", "portrait", "sport") it will only shoot jpegs. This isn't too big of a deal for me because I rarely use those modes. I highly recommend shooting in at least the "P" creative mode (if I'm remembering the terminology correctly) because it can be as easy as the green mode, but you can get raw files and have a lot more control as well.

I ended up getting an 80x 1GB card and a standard 512MB card for it. In most situations the higher speed card doesn't seem to matter to me while shooting, but it does download noticeably faster from my USB 2 card reader.

Image quality has been excellent so far. I took one image in particular, cropped the raw file down to about two-thirds of the original frame size with the included Digital Photo Professional software, saved it as a JPEG which I then took it into the local mini lab and had made it into a very nice 8x10. With the full frame (e.g. not cropped so severely) I'm sure at least an 11x17 would look fine. I've never wanted a picture larger than 8x10, but the 8.2MP do give you room for cropping and still get a good 8x10.

The low-light performance with the higher ISO settings is acceptable. I took some back-to-back pictures with the 20D and my 35mm Rebel using Kodak Gold ISO 400 film. In the few test prints I had made the 20D seemed to have less noise shooting at ISO 400 than the the actual ISO 400 film. Not that I've been overly impressed with Kodak Gold, but still it does indicate that the 20D can give you results at least as good as film, at least for snapshots and to my untrained eye. Looking at ISO 800 pictures on the computer you start to see a little noise. 1600 and 3200 ("H") get progressively worse, although really not as bad as I expected. My guess is ISO 1600 would be fine for many 4x6 prints.

As some have noted, the shutter is a bit on the loud side, but I don't think that it's overly obtrusive. Just another thing to remind you you've got a "real" camera in your hands. I read somewhere that the 20D's shutter is rated for 100,000 cycles and the quieter Rebel XT is only rated for 50,000 cycles.

In short, although it's pricey, I'm very pleased with it.