OddThinking

I recently purchased a Canon EOS 50D. Alastair requested a review which, rather oddly, didn’t occur to me before.

There are plenty of professional reviews of the 50D, and there are plenty of places you can get professional reviews of the 50D. There are even more places where you can find out exactly how many megapixels-wide the shutter speed ISOs at. I am attempting a more personal review that talks about the little details that don’t get mentioned in the advertisements.

My History of Cameras

In order to understand that, you need to know about my camera history.

I purchased a Canon EOS 500 (film) camera in early 1995. I had owned other cameras but it was my first SLR. I was already experienced with a series of other SLRs.

I purchased my first DSLR, a Canon EOS 300D (also known as the Canon Rebel in some markets,) in early 2003. I chose Canon because I already had a couple of Canon lenses. In hindsight, I should not have let that be the major factor in the purchasing decision. However, I was happy with Canon and the camera.

I did not consider myself an early adopter of digital cameras. I waited a long time for the price of DSLRs to come down before I purchased the 300D. However, I have had a few odd conversations of which this is an extreme example.

Them: “Oh, you got the 50D? No-one stays on the 450D for long, do they?”
Me: Bewildered look; I don’t know anyone unhappy with the 450D. What are they talking about?
Them: “Oh? Did you have the 450D or the 400D?”
Me: “Oh, err, no, I had an earlier model.”
Them: “The 350D?”
Me: “No, the 300D.”
Them: “Oh really!”

I can’t work out whether that means that I am a hopeless sluggard in upgrading my cameras (Is six years really that long to be dropping so much money on a luxury item?), whether I was an early adopter of DSLR (hence, 300D wasn’t a model they were familiar with) or whether I am hanging around with younger photographers who more recently took up the hobby (and hence that model was simply before their time). I suspect a little bit from each column.

My Basic Reaction

I’ve digressed a little, but there was a point. Consider the following factors:

• There has been a constant evolution of the digital camera quality over the past six years.
• I am poor at tracking and remembering what features the new camera have, while I am not in the market for a camera.
• I jumped up a level from the xxxD line to the xxD line

If you combine them, you might understand the basic initial reaction I had to my new camera:

OMG! I LOVE IT! For the first week, I was writing “Mrs Julian Canon 50D” in my diary over and over again.

The Big Ticket Items

Of course, the basic specifications of the new camera were better than the old one.

The mega-pixel count (for the little it is worth) went from 6.3 mega-pixels to 15.1 mega-pixels.

The highest ISO rating went from 1,600 to 12,800.

The LCD screen is “much damned bigger” than the old one.

The Little Ticket Items

I knew all the big ticket items before I started; they were the main factors in the upgrade.

However, it was the swag of minor items that were weren’t front and centre in the marketing that really got me passionate about the camera when I took it home and read the manual.

Some of the features I don’t put much priority on now, but might become extremely useful in odd situations. For example, the connection to the TV can now use HDMI. I never used the TV connection on my old camera, and I don’t currently own an HDMI cable, so I doubt the improvement will make much difference.

However, some of the features were exciting. Auto mode for ISO may be old-hat for some digital cameras, but it is nigh on miraculous to me.

Monochrome photography, with filtering? Meh, I can do that in photoshop.

Second-curtain flash? Woohoo! It will be great for photography of fire performers. (I am not the only one excited by this; On Saturday, I taught a performer how to turn on second-curtain flash on her Canon 450D, and she was over the moon.)

1/8000th of a second shutter speed? I dream of being having the luxury of having so much light on a scene! Maybe one day…

The camera is capable of operating in much lower light conditions – the old ISO 1600 extends, in theory, to 12,800. However, the noise levels at the highest ISO levels are horrendous. If you are trying to get a photo of the peeping tom skulking around in your garden, go for the high ISO; it’s good enough to recognise the person. If, on the other hand, you are a peeping tom looking for a centrepiece photo for the collection on your wall, you are going to be disappointed by anything higher than about ISO 1600. The Auto ISO function only extends to 3200; it doesn’t dare go further.

There are more intermediate (1/3 stop?) ISO values, such as ISO 500.

From a usability perspective, the camera has many more knobs and dials than the 300D. The impression I get is that that gave the interface designers the freedom to spend less time packing features into limited space, and more opportunity to make each feature take a minimum number of button presses to achieve. Often the same feature can be tweaked in several different ways.

I need to get familiar enough to change all the settings that I am likely to use, in the dark, first time. I am not there yet, but I am approaching it. I am not at the peeping tom level yet.

Compared to the 300D, the on/off switch is inconvenient to access while the camera is up to your eye. I guess, unlike me, professionals never forget that they turned their camera off.

There is a large dial on the back. Oddly, it can be deactivated by leaving the power switch in middle position; I wonder why. The dial on the back serves a similar purpose to the familiar thumbwheel on the front. This means that in one mode you can tweak two different settings at once. Which is nice, except, I can never guess correctly which wheel is going to adjust which setting.

Compared to the 300D, it can take incredibly fast consecutive shots (6.3 fps when in high-speed mode). That’s fast enough to do animated GIFs. It is also fast enough to mean that it is easy to accidentally take two shots instead of one. (It can be turned off, or slowed down, if desired.) I used this a few times for jugglers (who notorious throw props right in front of their face just as you take a picture,) but I am yet to inspect the results.

I find it startling how quickly people have lost the skill to look through a viewfinder. When others tried to use my 300D, some complained that they couldn’t see the image on the back of the screen as they framed the shot. (I, in contrast, find trying to frame an image with the camera a foot in front of my face to be clumsy, slow, and difficult to hold steady.) The 50D offers a Live View feature, which lifts up the mirror and pretends to be a compact. From memory, it has a couple of auto-focus modes, including face recognition, but I found the auto-focus to be too slow and clumsy, and the manual focus to be too imprecise and finicky to consider this ready for regular use. I can imagine it being useful for shots where the camera is in a position where it is awkward to put your head (e.g. close to the ground).

Live View also offers a couple of “silent shooting” modes which either reduce, or delay, the camera sounds. This makes it, once again, the perfect camera for a peeping tom.

The 50D has more image sizes to choose from, including small, medium and large RAW files. It also has a mode which takes RAW + JPG, which means you only need to go to the RAW file if you aren’t happy with the in-camera processing of white-balance, sharpness and the like. Talking of which, there is more control over how the camera processes sharpness, contrast, saturation and colour-tone.

Combined with a newer, faster memory card, the write-speed is much better. This has several advantages. You can take many consecutive rapid-dire shots in a row (dozens and dozens and dozens compared to four with the 300D); this is helped by having a larger buffer in the camera too. Also, when someone wants to see the photo you just took of them, it is much faster to bring it up. The 300D is noticeably slow at that.

The larger screen means that the display of the photo immediately after the shot can be far more intricate. There are red dots on the image showing the focal points, so you can be sure the important parts are in focus (which is normally tricky on the small screens).

I have been badly burnt by taking photos on the 300D when there was no memory card in the camera, so I was very happy to turn on the option on the 50D that forbid the camera from working without a memory card.

There are more metering modes on the 300D, from using the whole image to spot metering, to a mixture between the two.

There are some more modes, including night portrait (long exposure with a flash) and creative auto (which I am still figuring out – it is a mixture between the P mode and the full-auto creative mode).

The self-timer now includes a 2 second option, which is good for long-exposures without a cable release.

There are smarter auto-focus settings for moving objects; I haven’t figured these out yet.

It features in-built correction for issues with the lens having darker illumination near the edges. I haven’t played with this yet.

Other Benefits

I now have two working cameras (albeit with very different capabilities). That allows me to big note like a professional photographer and carry both! I photographed a circus show on the weekend (more details below) with both cameras around my neck.

The 50D was connected to my remote flash trigger, in manual mode, with a zoom lens and a moderately low ISO.

The 300D had no flash, a fast (f/1.8) fixed lens, and a higher ISO. It was only of use when the performers the stage lights were opened up, but many performers who throw things in the air (toss jugglers, diaboloists, devil-stickers, etc.) insist on having a lot of light on stage, so that was often enough to be worthwhile.

I was swapping back and forth between the two, which was much more convenient than trying to swap lenses, remote flash triggers, and change modes repeatedly. I haven’t studied the result yet, but I hope it gave a bit more visual variety to the photos I took too.

The Drawbacks

It hasn’t been all sunshine and flowers. I had precisely one complaint about the Canon 50D.

Cable Release

Once, I was persuaded to go on a photo-shoot with some friends to take photos of the New Year’s Eve fireworks over Sydney Harbour. I got some nice photos, but it wasn’t worth the 12 hour wait to get a good view. I needed a cable release so I could take long-exposure shots without camera shake. I had to buy a Canon-branded cable release for something like $100. When I saw that it was just two buttons, a cable with three wires, and an 3.5″ audio plug (all components I had laying around the house) I felt like I had been ripped off.

I still have that cable-release, but it isn’t much use to me now. You see, Canon changed the plug. It is still just two buttons and a cable with three wires, but now the plug is a custom Canon plug, that cannot be purchased at an electronics store, or by any third-party manufacturers. I am unimpressed with Canon’s greediness here; I already paid them far too much for one remote cable release. I am certainly not inclined to buy another one from them.

There are descriptions on the web about how you can hack one up with a VGA plug, a file and Araldite.

Batteries

This isn’t a complaint, so much as a confusion caused by the salesman. Canon, of course, have their own battery sizes. I know the 400D has a different sized battery to the 300D. I had three existing batteries to suit the 300D, and I feared that I would have to replace them all when I changed to the 50D. So I asked a salesman. He explained it would take both battery sizes; I was suitably impressed. What’s more, he demonstrated it to me – or at least, I thought he did. The important thing is it handled the 300D battery; the battery supplied with it was the same battery as the 300D, so I now have four of them.

I started out on Sunday with 4 freshly charged batteries, which I thought was enough for several days shooting. Turns out I managed to go through two of the batteries by 8pm, just before the show started. With two cameras, both containing a fresh battery, I thought I should be fine, but there wasn’t much safety margin, so I borrowed a battery from a 400D owner. It turns out the smaller 400D batteries do not fit in the 50D. Luckily I didn’t need it in the end.

Strap as a Status Symbol

I never really liked having my camera’s brand name appearing on the strap; I feel like a billboard.

Someone from a more brand-conscious generation filled me in that the red stripe on the new strap gives away from a distance that I have fancy Canon camera . I must look into finding a vintage camera strap from the days before brand-awareness

Again this isn’t a complaint about the camera, but just me proving again that I don’t fit in modern society.

The Incident

I said above that I had precisely one complaint about the Canon 50D. The key word there is “had“.

On Sunday, I had the first serious photo-shoot with the new camera. I wanted to be completely ready for it.

Before Sunday, I took hundreds of photos with the Canon 50D. When I first got it, I took photos at home of light fixtures, cupboards and my shoes while I figured out the features. I took it on several outings to make sure I could find and use the features I needed, on demand. I went to the tech run and tested the settings under the lights. I set-up my two cameras just so.

I was ready!

Indeed, the first half of the show went smoothly. It wasn’t until the second half, the Canon 50D suddenly displayed Err 99, and you know what that means… – no, neither did I. I couldn’t take a photo. My camera had blue-screened!

I immediately took the obvious action; I turned it off and on. No dice, it still said Err 99.

“Oh no, my new compact flash card is corrupt!” I thought, and changed it over for another one. Nope. Still Err 99. I turned it on and off again. It didn’t help.

I had to abandon the 50D. I hurriedly changed over the lens and the flash trigger to the 300D, ran through several test shots to get the manual metering right, and continued, having only missed a few minutes of the performance. I am so glad I was carrying a spare camera; complete disaster averted.

Ten minutes later, when there was a quiet moment in the performance, I checked the 50D again. It was back and functioning, but my system was all shot. I didn’t have time to get it all back the way I wanted it, and I wasn’t ready to trust that the 50D wouldn’t fail again. I ended up taking many of the shots of people on-stage with the in-built flash! Ugh! I don’t even want to look at them yet…

I have only done a little research so far on the Err 99 problem. The manual says to turn the camera off and on again, and to use a Canon lens. Yeah, thanks.

The Internet suggests it is a catch-all error message. (That’s bad news because, unless I can reliably reproduce it, whatever solutions people suggest may or may not fix the issue.)

The Internet also suggests that that upgrading the firmware solves an Err 99 problem by working around some timing problems with the communication with the lens which itself is caused poor quality gold used by some of the suppliers of the contacts. Sounds dodgy, but consistent with an intermittent problem going away when I swapped lenses. I see a (nail-biting) firmware upgrade in the future, followed by several months of distrust and uncertainty about my camera.

Definitely a sour taste, after the initial sweetness.