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Rangefinder
Magazine First
Exposure: Canon Digital Rebel by Ron Eggers
One of the newest digital SLRs on the market is the Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel, a compact model with some advanced capabilities. It has many of the features and capabilities of the company’s 10D digital SLR, including the image sensor. It’s designed around a Canon- manufactured, 6.3-megapixel CMOS sensor with an effective resolution of 3072x2048 pixels. Proprietary DIGIC image processing results in very high-quality images. At about $900 for the body, it’s the first true digital SLR with interchangeable lenses targeted at the prosumer market and affordable enough for any serious photographer, amateur or professional. There are a lot of things about the Digital Rebel I like, and a couple of things I’m not quite sure about. One of the most important considerations for serious photographers is speed. The camera was actual quite responsive. One thing that I had been warned about was the camera’s shutter lag. I shot a lot, and didn’t really experience consistent shutter lag, the extended delay between when the shutter release is first pressed to the time all the electronics are ready to fire. There were times, though, when the camera got confused when focusing. That was usually the case when there wasn’t something precise to focus on. Once I figured out the focusing characteristics, the problem was reduced, at least somewhat.
It offers a complete range of exposure, metering and focusing controls. Full shiftable program AE, aperture priority, shutter priority, auto depth-of-field AE and manual shooting modes are available. Special settings for different types of photography, such as landscapes, close-ups and night portraits are also available. They set the camera’s exposure options for optimum photographs for the different types of photography. An extended ISO equivalence of 100 to 1600 makes it possible to shoot in relatively low-light situations. Auto white-balancing and WB bracketing ensure the right color balance under a variety of lighting conditions. Multiple metering modes, including aperture TTL metering, evaluative metering, partial metering at center and (in manual) center-weighted averaging are available. Program auto-exposure, shutter priority, aperture priority, E-TTL autoflash and manual are available. Exposure compensation, up to two stops, plus or minus, is available, as is auto exposure bracketing.
The Digital Rebel uses Canon’s wide area autofocus system. One or more of the seven focusing squares turn red when objects in the frame are in focus. Individual focusing points can be selected manually, by the user, or automatically, by the camera. Autofocus (AF), for single focusing; AI Serve AF, for focus tracking and manual focusing are available. There is built-in dioptric correction for the viewfinder. The shutter speed extends from 30 seconds all the way to 1/4000 second, plus bulb. Its flash syncs up to 1/200 second. A built-in flash is available, but the camera doesn’t have PC cord connector. A slave or radio device may be attached to the hot- shoe, however. The camera can write captured images to either RAW or JPEG files. The RAW format is becoming increasingly important, and common, for professional applications. Captured images looked a lot better on the computer screen than they did on the Digital Rebels’ LCD. There were a couple of images I considered erasing when I saw them on the LCD. When I viewed them on the laptop, I was glad I kept them.
The Rebel’s shooting speed is acceptable. It’s rated at 2.5 frames per. When shooting in the single frame mode, it was possible to fire about a frame a second, for four frames. The time between frames increased to a little over two seconds after that. At about 10 or 11 frames, shooting became even slower, and somewhat irregular. The camera shipped with an EFS 18–55mm lens, which is roughly the coverage of 28–90mm on a 35mm camera. On The Road I had been invited on a 11-day trip by the Malaysia Tourism agency. Since I had just returned from a two-week trip to Thailand six weeks earlier, I wasn’t quite sure, at first, if I had the time (and the energy) for another Asian trip. I wound up going, and I’m really glad I did. It gave me the opportunity to shoot with the Digital Rebel under a wide variety of shooting and weather conditions. I spent time shooting in and around the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. K.L., as it’s known by locals, is an interesting city that blends a wide variety of cultures. It has a large Muslim populations, an interesting China Town, as well as a good-sized Indian community that offer all sorts of shooting opportunities.
From there, the group I was with flew up to Tamen Negara Gunung Mulu, staying at the Royal Mulu, a tropical rain forest resort deep in the heart of the jungle. It was monsoon season, so there were heavy rains every day. One afternoon, it rained almost two feet in two hours. It was a real kick to sit in the open air lobby of the resort and have torrential tropical rains outside, while listening to piped in versions of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” by the Christmas tree. There was plenty of time between the afternoon rains to shoot. We took long boats to local villages and some of the massive caves that dot the area. The riverside shacks and colorful long boats made strong visuals. A tin-roofed bar across the river from the resort served as a great place sit and watch the rains while downing a few cool ones.
Each evening, after shooting, I would download the images to the computer and quickly review them, discarding any I didn’t want to keep. The ability to see just how good (or bad) the shots come out is invaluable when shooting seriously. It’s extremely difficult to tell the good shots from the bad when looking at the quality of captured images on the small screens on digital cameras. Being able to see the final results, close-up, shortly after taking the photos makes it possible to make shooting adjustments, or compensate for at least some equipment difficulties that might come up. Ron Eggers is a senior editor at NewsWatch Feature Service. Email: Newswatch@Prodigy.net.
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The Digital Rebel is very comfortable
to shoot with. While it looks somewhat like a consumer camera, it has
the feel of a professional model. I won’t
take my EOS Rebel 2000 35mm camera on an assignment. I, however, wouldn’t
have any problem taking the 300D along, and I did, on an Malaysian excursion.
Auto exposure was relatively good, but there were quite
a few times when images were a little too light. When shooting manually,
I tended to shoot
at the metered reading for the aperture, and set the shutter speed somewhat
faster.
The menu structure is simple. There
are four primary menus. The first determines shooting values such as
image quality, auto-exposure settings,
and white balance. The second is the output menu, with options to protect
and print images and the ability to rotate the image when displayed.
The last two are operational menus that do things like set the time and
date, format the CompactFlash cards and a special setting to clean the
image sensor. 
I also shot in Kuching, the
largest Malaysian city on Borneo, an island that is shared with Indonesia
and Brunei Darussalam. There I got to meet
and photograph the King of Malaysia and the Sultan of Brunei at a major
cultural event celebrating the end of the Islamic Ramadan fast. 
The trip gave me
the chance to take my new Sony Vaio TR2A laptop on the road. The lightweight
Intel Centrino sub-compact comes with an extremely
visible 16:9 format screen, a 40GB hard drive and a combo DVD player/CD-R
writer drive. That makes it an ideal companion for shooting digitally
on the road.