I've been a digital camera enthusiast since before they were remotely affordable. I got my first one, an Olympus D500-L years ago, when it was the first digital SLR to break the $1000 price barrier. At the time, I said it would keep me happy until a "real" digital SLR with removable lenses and manual controls came out for under $1000. Today, my faithful weekly cnet spam informed me that canon had done just that.

I've read the press releases and the chatter online, and I'm very tempted to order one. Luckily, I'm just starting a photography course this week, so I'll be shooting black and white film with a 25 year old camera for the next few months while the reviews come out. Come december, the great Karma vs. Camera debate will have the be settled.

I know there are plenty of people on this board with more photography experience than me. Any opinons on the Canon Digital Rebel? Would I be shooting myself in the foot not springing for the 10D?

Matthew

I think you would probably be very happy with the Rebel/300D/Kiss (three names for the same camera). Given that the sensor and the processing is the same as the 10D it is likely to be able to produce the same stunning results as the 10D.

You do need to be aware of the drawbacks compared to the 10D though. Off the top of my head they are:

- plastic body, though depending on the quality of the plastic this might not make any difference (the lens mount is at least metal)
- less control over the auto focus modes (with the 10D you can choose the three different modes yourself, with the 300D they are chosen for you by the camera)
- less control over metering (metering is dependant on the shooting mode, rather than being individually controlable)
- less control over flash settings
- no 3200 ISO, you're not likely to miss this, I very rarely resort to it
- only 2.5 frames per second, still 2.5 isn't bad...
- only a four frame buffer (10D has nine frames), shouldn't be a problem unless you are into shooting fast sports
- no control wheel on the back (cursor keys instead)

The 300D does actually have a few things that the 10D doesn't do:

- the battery grip for the 300D has more controls on it than the one for the 10D
- there is an infra red remote available
- the internal flash is higher meaning it will be blocked by less lenses
- the new EF-S lens mount, allowing for much cheaper wide angle lenses. The 18-55mm that comes with it looks like quite a good deal for $100

If I was buying my camera now I would probably still end up with a 10D, but it is a close run decision. I think the silver body would sway the decision, I like black cameras

Probably best to wait for the http://www.dpreview.com/ review.

My first digital was a pretty cruddy Fuji DX-5 in 1997ish, it cost about £230 and is appalling by today's standards.

In '99ish I desperately wanted a "real" digital SLR but the only one was the amazingly expensive Nikon D1, so I settled for the Nikon CP990 and I have been very pleased with it.

I was looking at getting that new Sony DSC-F828 (I know somebody who works at Sony and might be able to get me one at staff discount) but this has thrown me!

Just found some more info here:

http://www.canoneos.com/digitalrebel/

Gareth

The Sony DSC-F828 is the first Sony camera that I would ever seriously consider. I always admired Sony's form factor with the swiveling body and nice Carl Zeiss lens, but the previous lack of a raw mode and insistence on Memory Stick media put me off. Sony has finally fixed both concerns. Now, you get a 28-200mm equiv. lens with a bright f2.0-2.8 aperture and a massive 8 megapixel sensor, all in a two pound package. Not bad! As far as I can tell, the only feature it seems to lack is automatic orientation detection. My Canon G3 happily rotates my images for me if I shoot vertically.

Also, when you get into RAW mode, you're wedding yourself to that vendor's crappy software on your PC. I could gripe for hours about Canon's software. Heaven only knows whether Sony is any better.

I do, at some distant point in the future, want a D-SLR, but I'm in no hurry. I'm waiting for the technology to stabilize somewhat. In particular, as sensor sizes shake out, you'll see many more lenses engineered to be lightweight and smaller, taking advantage of the smaller sensor size. Heaven knows, maybe we'll eventually see digital rangefinders with interchangeable lenses (analogous to Leica M-series cameras, and perhaps even made by Leica). That would be my preference.

Also, as it happens, one of the features of my G3 that I've turned out to love the most is the rotating and flipping screen. You can easily shoot from the hip, shoot from far over your head, and so forth. It's amazingly versatile and none of the D-SLRs offer such a feature. Yet.

Amazing! Why on earth would Sony offer an alternative to memory sticks? How wonderful that they are admitting to their own limitations.

Thanks for the great comparison. The only thing I'd really like is the 9 shot buffer. And the black metal case, of course. Years ago I held a basic film Rebel and remembered thinking how light/cheap it felt. Hopefully this one won't have the same feeling. I'll probably wait and see what the street price difference really is in december, and pick one. It's amazing how canon is dominating the market so throughly. The D30 -> D60 ->10D (-> 300D) progression has gone amazingly fast.

How well does the software work for handleing raw images? Am I correct in thinking that all I'd need is an easy way to batch convert them into TIFFs? Considering the sheer number of these cameras they've sold I assume they've worked out something decent.

Matthew

You can always do batch conversions, but the main point of shooting in raw mode is that you can do very fine color corrections, gamma corrections, and other tweaks to get the best possible results. The process is analogous to carefully hand-printing pictures from negatives. If you shoot an entire batch with the same lighting, then you can apply the same settings everywhere, but otherwise you need to hand-tweak everything.

For the D-SLRs, there's a bunch of third party software (e.g., Bibble) that is widely considered to be better than the factory software. For the "prosumer" digital cameras, you're pretty much stuck. For Canon, there is a freeware converter tool, but it doesn't have any color correction features. It just dumps out TIFF or whatever files and you're expected to clean them up yourself, after the fact.

Unless you enjoy spending multiple evenings sifting through a single day's photos and tweaking to suit, you're unlikely to enjoy shooting in RAW mode. Clunky, HUGE files, lousy vendor software, and only a tiny unnoticeable improvement in MOST images.

Third party software can help (a lot), but that's extra money that could be used for better lenses or other toys.

I'm a fanatic, but I use .JPG exclusively with my D60 -- tried RAW, but it just ain't feasible for me yet -- I prefer spending more time on other activities, thanks, than fiddling with MS-specific conversion software.

Cheers

I'm with Mark on this one. Since getting my 10D I have taken about 3,000 photos. Only about three of them were taken with raw and I never got round to processing those three raw files anyway.

Maybe when I have a more powerful PC (my PII300 really makes a meal of processing raw images) I might look at raw a bit more, because I sometimes wish that the white balance in my photos could be better and it would be nice to access that extra bit of dynamic range occasionally.

For my purposes though the high quality jpegs that the 10D produces are fine.

I've been shooting exclusively with raw mode for 3.5 years or so, and I haven't found it too much of a burden. When I load pictures from the camera into the computer, I generally let the software convert them with "camera settings", yielding the same JPEG's you would have gotten straight from the camera. It's all batch, even with Canon's poor software, so you get it started and then go off to read e-mail or something. For the occasional image where I really care, I go in and put more effort into it, typically generating a 16-bit TIFF and spending 10 minutes with Photoshop's "Adjust Levels" to get everything agonizingly just so.

Also, I only use Canon tools for the raw conversion. Thereafter, I use a mix of standard JPEG-handling tools. The latest Canon ZoomBrowser is nice enough, however, to generate sub-directories that include the shooting date in their name, which is a perfectly rational way to organize huge amounts of data. I usually append something about the subject I shot that day so I can later find what I'm looking for quickly.

If I took that approach at the moment a typical day's shooting of 100 photos would take over 8 hours to upload...

...my PII300 takes about five minutes per raw-jpeg conversion. I need a new PC...

P.S. If I ever start using raw like that then I will have to upgrade my RAID as well, I would run out of space even quicker than I am now

Yeah, you need a fairly modern PC. On my P4-2.4GHz, it takes something like 10sec/picture for the raw transfer, which is about the same as the USB transfer time. Again, it's fairly easy to overlap this with doing "real" work (comparable to ripping CDs in terms of how often you need to babysit the operation), and it's worth it for the occasional picture that you want to truly "perfect".

Incidentally, some new cameras, like the aforementioned Sony, will record both a JPEG and a RAW file of the same shot. This increases your common-case throughput (assuming transfer time and disk space aren't issues for you), while still giving you the option to do later touch-up.

I can't find where I read it, but I'm fairly certain the 300D will record RAW and jpegs at the same time. Kind of a hit on the compact flash card, I would think, but would be great in theory for archiving.

Is there a non proprietary format the raw images can be transfered to that won't loose any of the information?

Matthew

Both the 10D and the 300D always save a jpeg embedded in the raw file (as well as the thumbnail). With the 10D you get to choose what quality the jpeg is (from the normal jpeg size/quality set), with the 300D you can't choose the size/quality.

I guess this should mean that to get the jpeg with the in camera settings from the raw should be nice and quick. I haven't found and software that will just allow me to extract these jpegs in a batch mode.

I wish Canon had done it differently, by saving the raw and the jpeg as separate files. I think they do this on their more expensive cameras.

Is there a non proprietary format the raw images can be transfered to that won't loose any of the information?

None that would lose none of the information. The raw data has all the the data from the sensor before it has been interpolated into pixels.

All the normal image formats out there are designed to store pixels with a single colour each. The data in the raw is very different, with each entry in it presenting the brightness of one of the light wells behind one of the red, green or blue filters.

Different software can turn this raw data into normal pixels in different ways. In theory some one in the future could come up with new software to produce better results from the raw data.

In theory some one in the future could come up with new software to produce better results from the raw data.

To that end, I've made a point of burning CDs that have raw files and the associated directory structure that's identical to the original CF card. This means that dumb software (like Canon's ZoomBrowser) can be fooled into thinking that the CD is just another CF card (albeit read-only).

I treat raw files like negatives. They're precious and to be saved. The JPEGs I make from them are nice, but I don't stress out about keeping them safe.

There's a good rundown on RAW files at Luminous Landscape.

-Zeke

Vendors, and vendor-specific file formats (eg. "Canon Raw") come and go.. open standards live on..

-ml