Big Dog on the block

Author's Rating:

Pros: High resolution, sensor cleaning, fast

Cons: a little on the light side

The Bottom Line: 
All those people buying Sony DSC and Kodak 800 series, trade them in, your camera is ready - a real dSLR at a regular persons price

Author's Review
The Rebel XTi is the newest member of the Digital Rebel family As befits the market leader in digital cameras they have taken a successful product and improved it. Where the original Rebel sported 6.3MP, the XT sported 8MP the new XTi sports 10.1MP

The next big new thing is the introduction of a 2.5 inch display up from the 1.8 inch in the XT. Startup time is now down to 2/10 of a second making it virtually instantaneous to go from off to ready to use, this was one of the drawbacks to the original Rebel – it was always fast enough to use when it was on, but you often missed things while it was waking up.

The Xti also incorporates some neat new features such as a sensor that detects the camera being held up to your eye that automatically turns of the display – no more distracting images in your peripheral vision. The Xti also introduces an ultrasonic self cleaning system to remove dust from the image sensor, a simple process that can be done completely automatically.

As with all the Canon dSLRs storage is via compact flash and typically the faster the CF card you use the faster you take consecutive images. Obviously with a larger file size, the benefits of moving to an 80x or even a 120x card soon become plain, particularly if you intend to take advantage of the 3fps shooting for sports shots.

I have seen many people put down the range of the zoom that comes with the camera (an 18-55) but given that the sensor is smaller than 35mm film the actual zoom (or for that matter any lens you attach) has its range multiplied by 1.6 – so it becomes a 29 to 88 zoom, good for landscapes to portrait. Although not a fast lens it is a Canon and yields reasonable quality images. If you need greater range or more speed, there over 60 Canon lenses to choose from, plus lenses from Sigma, Tamron and Vivitar. With prices for the body only starting as low as $540 it has to be a bargain.

Picture quality as one would expect is superb, with a new ‘picture mode’ added that lets you change the sharpness and saturation of images in the camera. Colors are bright and exciting, imagery is sharp and artifact free even in JPG mode. Shooting in raw and moving images to Photoshop creates the highest possible quality.