Canon EOS 300D digital SLR review

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2004. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

I was lucky enough to receive a Canon 300D digital SLR camera for Christmas. This is the much talked about first digital SLR camera for under £1000. Although I liked my existing digital camera, it was mainly aimed at a mid-range market and lacked several fancy features.

The Canon has all the normal features you would expect on a digital camera, but its great flexibility - and indeed one of the main selling points - is that it accepts all the existing Canon SLR range of accessories and lenses. I use the camera for a variety of roles, including taking pictures of the kids, creating images for a website I run and taking pictures of skin lesions and other signs at work, and this ability to perform different tasks is very useful.

If, like me, you have an old Canon EOS SLR and have several lenses and a flash for it, including a macro lens, then this is a great leap forward. Owners of other makes will have to wait for them to catch up. A macro lens allows greater magnification at close range than standard lenses and far outperforms any mid-priced digital camera lens. If you don’t want to pay for an extra lens, the standard lens that comes with the camera is excellent, is very sharp and allows close views of objects.

Interestingly, the main rationale behind an SLR camera is not the interchangeable lenses but the fact that what you see through the lens is what the camera sees, and the metering and focusing are based on this. This in theory allows you to take better pictures. It also allows you to accurately frame your shots. The camera can be used as a point and shoot and has several auto modes that make taking pictures easy. The camera isn’t really for this, and it also has several more advanced modes for greater control.

My old camera had one annoying feature, commonly found on digital cameras, which can result in ruined photos, namely shutter lag. This is the time it takes between pressing the button and the picture being taken - up to a second on some cameras. This might not sound much, but if you are trying to take pictures of small children running around or trying to capture someone’s expression then it can ruin a picture. To test if your camera has a long shutter lag, ask a volunteer to place their hands in front of them and open them at a reasonable speed when you say go. The wider apart they appear on the photo, the longer your shutter lag. The 300D has a very short lag and can even take three pictures a second to help you get the best action shot.

The camera does have a couple of drawbacks; it is quite large and looks like a traditional camera. Also, because the camera uses a proper shutter, it doesn’t give you a preview on the LCD or take movies, though it does display the picture on a screen afterwards so you can check it was correct.

The camera stores its pictures on CompactFlash cards which, although a bit bulky, are cheap and come in large sizes. I have a 1GB IBM Microdrive, which is actually a small hard disk inside the CompactFlash card. It will hold 350 pictures at high resolution.

The camera will print direct to a Canon printer and has quite a lot of options for this. It will also transfer pictures to your computer via the USB cable, or the CompactFlash card can be put into a card reader connected to your computer.

It comes with a lot of software to manage your pictures and to help the transfer. It also comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is a standard photo editing program that has a great deal of functionality. If you are printing your own pictures then you can use Photoshop to process the pictures and arrange them for printing. Many shops offer printing digital pictures onto photo paper; my local shop offers 50 pictures for £5.

Another interesting piece of software included is called Remote Camera. This allows the camera, while placed on a tripod, to be controlled from the computer. This is very useful for studio shots, as not touching the camera reduces shake and creates clearer shots. This could be useful if you were taking a lot of close-up shots of skin lesions or for photos of staff for ID badges.

Overall, I don’t think you could justify buying one of these purely for surgery work unless you were seriously interested in dermatology and were going to go the whole hog with macro lenses and specialist lighting. However, if like me you have a range of Canon equipment and an interest in photography rather than snaps, it would make a good choice that would also allow excellent photography at work.