by Guy Lerner
March 31, 2003
I’ve been a keen photographer for over half a decade now, and never in that time have I seen so much interest and excitement over a new camera as I’ve witnessed in the past couple of months.
In that short time, Canon – widely regarded as one of the two leading camera and lens manufacturers by professionals and consumers alike – discontinued production of its flagship midrange digital SLR camera, the D60 (to the dismay of may new and potential D60 owners) and, with eager customers already frothing at the mouth at speculation of the D60’s imminent replacement, unveiled the 10D at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show, held in Las Vegas at the end of February.
You may be wondering what all the commotion is about, especially if you’re new to photography, digital photography or both. In this hands-on review of the 10D, I’ll try answer some of your questions, with comparisons between the 10D, the D60 and its predecessor, the D30 (both of which I briefly owned and used), and in the larger context of the rapidly growing digital SLR market.
For Starters
First things first, let me set the boundaries of this review. If you’re not sure what a digital SLR camera is, or have never used an SLR before (digital or film), some of the concepts I’ll be discussing here may confuse you. If that’s the case, feel free to e-mail me and I’ll try to clarify them as best I can.
At the same time, if you’re looking for an in-depth, technically loaded dissection of the 10D, you won’t find it here either. There are plenty of popular and informative sites on the Internet that specialise in camera dissections, but this isn’t one of them. I can personally recommend Phil Askey’s definitive digital photography portal, Digital Photography Review (www.dpreview.com) for this sort of analysis.
What you will find is a frank, honest (I try) discussion on the 10D as a camera – what it gives us that we never had before, how it improves on previous cameras, and how it positions itself in the market. You may be sitting on the fence with a D30 or D60 and wondering if the 10D really merits an upgrade, considering that even at a US street price of $1499 (body only) this is not a cheap plaything to buy your kids for Christmas. Hopefully this review will inform your decision.
I’ve also been keenly involved with several online digital photography forums of late, and have come across numerous “findings” by new 10D owners about the way the camera behaves in certain conditions. In my brief time with the 10D I haven’t had a chance to investigate all of these findings personally, and indeed many of which – after looking for them – I couldn’t find anyway, so the perspective I offer is a personal one given to me by my own camera. And before you ask, no, Canon didn’t send me a review sample; I had to go out and actually buy one!
Refinements Aplenty
I’ve heard the 10D called everything from “the refined D60” to “the baby 1Ds” and considered titling this review with a similar catch phrase. In my mind, however, the 10D stands on its own as a true second-generation digital SLR in Canon’s midrange DSLR lineage. (For clarification, I consider the D60 a first-generation DSLR, even though it offered more resolution than the original D30. In all other respects, the D30 and D60 were almost identical).
While the 10D retains the same-sized CMOS imaging sensor of the D60 (with 6,3 million effective pixels), in almost every other respect it’s a different camera. The shape of the body is a close match, but under the skin the 10D houses a moulded magnesium alloy shell similar to that found in Canon’s far more expensive 1-series cameras, making it cool to the touch. Edges that were angled on the D60 are now smoothed out, following the contours of the metal shell. The flash housing and lens mount areas are also notably wider, giving the 10D a more solid look. The D60 was certainly well built, so the 10D improves on the quality that’s already there.
While the new look of the 10D has subjectively been regarded as stylish by some, ugly by others (yes, ugly, go figure), my (equally subjective) opinion: without knowing anything else about the two cameras, if I saw the 10D and D60 side by side I’d pick the 10D on looks alone.
The refinements to the 10D don’t stop there, so allow me to run through a quick checklist of improvements before I go over the important ones in more detail later on:
NEW: Magnesium alloy shell replaces the D30/D60 stainless steel and plastic housing (but you knew that already).
NEW: Redesigned button layout (top and back) with dedicated buttons (ISO, LCD illumination), better positioned on-off switch, and dual-function buttons for operation and playback. A new Assist button lets you quickly jump to a preselected AF point, a feature inherited from the 1-series.
NEW: Refined control dial, with quicker (but more sensitive) turning action and less “resistance” than the D60/D30 dial (some people prefer the older dial, with its grooved design and tactile feedback; I don’t have a preference either way).
NEW: Much improved autofocus system, with seven AF points and a CMOS-based engine adapted (according to Canon) from the EOS 30/Elan 7 film body. If there was one hamstring on the D60/D30, it was autofocus (particularly in low light), and I can confirm the 10D puts all the old fears to rest, and then some. In unofficial testing, I found the 10D capable of locking focus in good light nearly twice as fast as the D60, and in poor light, while not a speedster, it locked onto targets the D60 simply wouldn’t have recognised.
NEW: Integrated AF assist light. Actually that’s a diplomatic way of saying there’s no AF assist light, but rather a compromised system that uses the internal flash to fire off a high frequency burst that helps with AF in low light, low contrast conditions. Fortunately this gets rid of the ugly (yes, ugly) AF assist light on the D60/D30, but doesn’t do much for usability. I disabled the AF assist, and if need be use the almost invisible assist light on my external Canon SpeedLite flash.
NEW: Quieter, faster shutter. The D30 was fast, the D60 faster; the 10D is faster still, and quieter too. At high shutter speeds in mildly noisy environments, you sometimes have to check if the shutter actually tripped. You also don’t need to “anticipate” a shot as much as before, as the camera will record the scene the instant the shutter’s depressed.
NEW: Higher ISO sensitivity, expanding the D60’s 1000 ISO-equivalent limit to 1600, with an “H” (3200) setting “just in case”. More importantly it seems Canon’s new DiGiC processor (or sensor manufacturing improvements, take your pick) have resulted in lower noise images at low and mid-to-high ISO settings. This makes low-noise, high-speed shooting possible for more than acceptable results, even for large prints. You can consider the 10D a faster camera for this reason alone, maintaining the high quality images pioneered by the D60 at higher speed.
NEW: Selectable white balance temperature settings (2800 - 10000° Kelvin in 100° steps). In my testing so far, white balance settings – especially the sometimes-troublesome auto setting – have also produced more accurate results.
NEW: Better colour space options, with Adobe RGB now supported in-camera (although with this setting, all other settings – sharpness, contrast, tone and saturation – are unavailable). Halfway there Canon.
NEW: Vertical and horizontal orientation sensor, so the camera knows when you’re shooting in portrait or landscape mode and tags the captured image accordingly (it doesn’t physically save a rotate image for some reason). If you’re using compatible software, the picture is presented in the correct orientation right out the camera.
NEW: Brighter, crisper LCD screen, complete with 10-step, 10x image playback that fixes another major gripe with the D60. You can now zoom right into your pictures to check for focus accuracy, and see them clearly even in bright sunlight. You can’t even do that on a 1D.
Despite the upside, there are some notable omissions, including an integrated AF assist light (I’m glad it’s gone, but others aren’t), eye-controlled AF (I’ve owned two ECF Canons before, and never used it much, so again a moot point for me), and a real DEP (DEPth of field) mode (the A-DEP mode on the 10D, while more useful with seven AF points, is still a beginner’s tool).
I also can’t see why Canon stuck with the D60’s morbidly slow USB 1.1 interface, when USB 2.0 is a recognised standard. FireWire would have been nice, but USB 2.0 I consider a bare minimum for this class of camera. An external USB 2.0 or FireWire card reader quickly takes care of this shortcoming however, and since I’d use a card reader anyway, no real damage done (maybe that’s what Canon’s thinking was anyway).
There are numerous other polishes and fix-me-ups I can mention, but I think this list begins to explain – if not rationalise – the excitement felt by so many, myself included, for this camera. Would it translate to real-world use? Would the images the 10D produces match – and exceed – the quality we’ve come to expect from a Canon DSLR? These are the questions photographers are asking, and the answers I’ll be testing for in the remainder of this review.
True Colours The D30 went against the grain (literally) by producing almost noise-free images at ISO speeds of up to 400, and even at 800 ISO, D30 images were far less “noisy” than comparable film stock. The D60 continued this tradition with equally low noise output, a remarkable achievement considering how much smaller (and therefore theoretically more noise-prone) its light-sensitive pixels were compared to the D30’s. The compromise – a reduced ISO limit of 1000 (compared to the D30’s 1600 limit), supposedly because noise at ISO 1600 would have been overly intrusive even with the D60’s built-in noise reduction algorithms.
Unveiling the 10D, Canon not only increased the ISO limit (to 3200) but suggested that noise at all ISO settings has been minimised further by the camera’s new onboard processor and sensor production improvements. The picture crops below, taken with a 10D, go some way to substantiating that claim. While this is not a scientific test, nor a basis for comparison between the 10D and the D60/D30, it shows that noise is suppressed to a minimum at up to 400 ISO, and even at 1600 ISO noise is manageable with the correct exposure (noise shows itself mostly in poorly exposed, flat-colour areas).
Further, with the use of noise-reduction software, high-ISO 10D images can be virtually “cleaned” of any objectionable noise, one of the (many) benefits of working with digital files.
Noise aside, Canon has definitely modified the internal workings of the new camera. Despite it’s Dxx lineage, the image output – based on the new processing system (and apparently a metering structure closer to the 1-series cameras) – sets the 10D apart in terms of visible, measurable results. I’m not surprised that D60 owners, using the camera for the first time, are dumbfounded in trying to achieve “D60-like” results from the 10D (why they would want to do so is another matter entirely, but I assume it’s because the D60’s output was so impressive to begin with).
This might also explain why Canon broke with the Dxx naming convention (although that’s pure speculation on my side). With its 1Ds-inherited software and metering, new focus engine, and handsome design, it does appear as closely related to the 1-series Canons as it does to the D60 it replaces. Cynically the name change was probably nothing more than a marketing stunt, but on closer examination it may have some substance to it after all.
But I digress. I began this part of the review by talking about colour, and that’s where I’m headed.
A very subjective issue, colour presents different things to different people. With improved metering, white balance and colour space options, the 10D is definitely promoting itself as a colour-savvy machine. Many of us felt the pleasure of D30 and D60 images was the punchy, saturated colour these cameras produced; others considered it inaccurate and obtrusive. As I said, a subjective issue. Personally I’m firmly in the give-me-more-punch camp, having used Fuji’s highly saturated colour film, Velvia (and later Kodak’s 100VS film stock) for each and every photograph I ever made with film.
The 10D, on first use, leans more towards colour accuracy over fidelity. This is most notable in skin tones, which with the D60 often appeared with a reddish cast (and the D30 yellow, at least my D30) – although I admit this could have been affected by metering and/or exposure. The D60 certainly had a tendency to underexpose (only slightly, but it was there), which also affected the colour balance of its images.
Speaking of exposure, the 10D, with more accurate metering, perhaps errs on the other end of the scale. For digital imaging technicians, this can be seen as problematic, because underexposure can usually be corrected in computer, but overexposure – especially where highlights are “blown” – is irreparable even with the most advanced software (blown highlights lose all their pixel-level information, while underexposed shadows retain much of their pixel data).
More advanced photographers I’ve spoken with on this issue think otherwise. For them, accuracy is preferable to safety, and with accurate metering and skilful exposure on the photographer’s part, blown highlights are as likely as underexposed lowlights – in other words, not very.
Is this a benefit or a disadvantage? I guess it depends on your level of skill and eye for exposure. While the D60 consistently underexposed most of my images by up to a stop, the 10D is closer to dead-on accurate. While I didn’t have to pay as much attention to the highlights in my scenes using the D60, I am forced to do so by the 10D. In my opinion this serves as a kick up the wazoo for my exposure technique, which, with the safety net of D60 exposures, was not as sharp as it could and should have been.
Much of this can be circumvented, of course, if you simply check yourself for accuracy – and the 10D’s (and D60’s) built-in info tool and histogram (not to mention that blinking (that’s not a curse folks) clipped highlights display), make exposure inaccuracy with a DSLR a cardinal sin.
(Note: at the time of this writing I didn’t do any serious testing using the 10D’s custom function 16, which is supposed to automatically adjust exposure if the camera feels the scene will be overexposed. This is yet another 1Ds-like feature, and one that may go some way to helping the photographer in difficult exposure situations).
Some early critics of the 10D have attacked the “flat” colour it supposedly produces. In my experience, this is not so (see the picture
above of my son’s play bike, for example). I’d agree that the 10D’s colours, for certain subjects (such as skin and foliage) is more neutral that than the D60’s out of camera. This doesn’t mean the 10D produces flatter colours, but it does produce different colour to its predecessor.
The 10D features new five-step settings panels for saturation, sharpness, contrast and tone. If you’re set on mimicking the D60’s colours on the 10D, you’ll get close by upping the saturation level to +1 or even +2 (beware of colour shifts if you go to the extreme) and the contrast to +1.
Additionally, if you shoot in RAW mode, you can change these settings post-exposure, which lets you shoot to your heart’s content without concerning yourself with these settings at the time of exposure. That’s the way I do it, and even at the RAW conversion stage, prefer an even saturation setting so I have a more accurate rendition to work with later in Photoshop.
Softly, Softly Without going off on too much of a tangent, this softness is the result of an anti-aliasing filter that sits between the lens and the image sensor to “smooth out” any unwanted image artefacts. While refining the image, the filter also affects the perceived level of detail, giving the image a “dream-like” look, for want of a better analogy.
What many people assume, at first, is that the image lacks detail. In truth the detail is there aplenty, but needs to be extracted using a common software technique called Unsharp Masking. USM can be found in most decent image processing applications such as Photoshop, and despite the odd name, actually improves the level of perceived detail or sharpness by emphasising the edges in an image. (This is because the human visual system decodes image detail from edge sharpness, among other things).
Canon has, since the D30 and now with the 10D, always been very conservative with its in-camera sharpening, opting for softer-looking images that can be heavily processed later in-computer. New to the 10D, however, is a more aggressive sharpening setting that can make images appear sharper out of camera.
The images below are 100% cops from a full-size image taken in RAW mode, with sharpening set to 0. Sharpening was kept at 0, and the image was converted to TIFF for processing in Photoshop, where 300% USM was applied at a radius of 0.6 pixels with a threshold of 0. The level of USM will depend on the image you’re processing, but in this case it was applied to illustrate how much detail the image actually contains despite its softer initial appearance.
Cheaper consumer cameras and some DLSR cameras apply more processing in-camera, which produces apparently sharper images with minimal post-processing. This means pictures are ready to use out of camera.
But convenience comes at a cost; highly processed images give the photographer less room to manoeuvre for optimising his images in-computer. USM on an already sharpened image, for example, introduces unwanted artefacts and can rapidly impact image quality. 10D images, on the other hand, lend themselves to extensive post-processing, so that the final image is of a much higher quality, with far cleaner and more vivid detail, than consumer output.
That said, I agree with some users that a higher degree of in-camera sharpening should be available as an option for 10D users who prefer to do less work in-computer. While I enjoy the process of tweaking my images to perfection (and with Photoshop actions customised to my workflow, this is hardly time consuming), a greater degree of automation would be handy. Canon has been less aggressive with its filtering in the higher-end 1-series, something I’d like to see adopted by 10D-level cameras.
Mod-Cons Even though shutter lag (the time between fully depressing the shutter and exposing the picture) is measured in milliseconds, the 10D immediately feels more nimble than the D60, allowing me to capture a moment as my eye sees it. Coming from a D30, I can’t tell you how often I missed the “critical” moment because I wasn’t quick enough on the shutter and didn’t account for the camera’s lag between my press and its action. With the 10D, this is no longer a problem. The camera is faster than I am, so unless I’m having an off day, what I see is exactly what the camera will record.
Battery life I mention last, not because it’s insignificant, but because ever since the D30 it’s never been an issue. Canon has cleverly stuck with the high-capacity BP-511 (or 512) Lithium Ion cell it uses across several product lines, and with the low-power CMOS sensor and improved power management with the DiGiC processor, I’ve gone a full day of active shooting with two batteries in the 10D without the power indicator leaving the “full” mark.
Since the day I bought the D30 it was never separated from the most useful accessory you could buy for it, the vertical battery grip (a.k.a. Big Ed or BG-ED3). Not only does the grip add vertical controls and a shutter button for easy portrait shooting, it also adds a second battery slot so you can load two BP-511’s and never even look at your battery level unless you’re shooting continuously with full flash without a break (the 10D is rated at nearly 650 shots per battery, to give you an idea).
The 10D is fully compatible with Big Ed, and oddly enough the styling of the grip is more consistent with the 10D than it was with the D30 or D60 before it (except for the finish, which retains the D60’s lustre rather than the 10D’s matte). The grip also lacks the 10D’s new Assist button, and the focus point label still shows three points (versus the 10D’s seven). Still, it works and functions flawlessly, and transforms the 10D from a smallish-looking camera into a professional-looking tool.
For some the extra bulk is overkill; personally I can’t see myself using the 10D without it. I’m surprised Canon didn’t introduce a newer version of the grip with the 10D, adding the missing button and perhaps another feature or two (sound annotation anyone?) but here’s hoping BG-ED 4 is already in the pipeline. (And while we’re at it, don’t buy the grip without the accompanying E1 hand strap; it’s not a must but it’s comfortable, useful, and looks way cool).
Parting shot Everything from the look and feel to ergonomics, balance, responsiveness and intuitiveness contribute to the photographer’s experience of his primary picture-making tool. In other words, the way the camera feels and responds goes a long way to making the photographic experience more pleasurable, or more painful.
The 10D is anything but painful; the major points of pain for D60 users have been isolated, addressed and resolved. Slow AF, erratic metering, consistent underexposure, noticeable lag, and low ISO limits are things of the past. A larger buffer, superb battery life, bright LCD, precise playback and selectable white balance and colour settings make the 10D more responsive, easier to use and more accurate than its predecessor.
No, it’s not all roses. USB 1.1 remains for no apparent reason, total shutdown when accidentally opening the CompactFlash door while in use is annoying, and for some reason the camera takes an age to wake up from power saving mode (I just set the time-out to 15 minutes and forget about it, since battery life is so good).
I began this review with the observation that no camera before it has attracted so much attention, and produced such a frenzy, as the 10D has in the short time since its announcement and release. Hopefully, through my findings, you can begin to appreciate why this is so.
Conclusion The 10D earns the full five Go Inside review lights, and I have no hesitation in awarding it the Go Inside Editor’s Choice Award for technical excellence.
What I do miss from my film days, if I had to be picky, is a slightly faster drive mode (at three frames per second, the 10D is fast, but just one or two more would do the trick) and, I’m sure many would agree, a spot meter. However difficult it may be to include a spot meter with the 10D’s 1.6x crop factor (the result of a smaller sensor size compared to a 35mm film frame), I still think that leaving it out is a shortcoming, and I’m sure one that will be addressed in the next (more expensive) model later this
year or early next.
The 10D is a 6,3 megapixel CMOS-based digital SLR camera. Ever since the D30 was announced (2000) and released (2001), Canon made a point of pounding the critics of CMOS sensors (and there were many) with startling images from its proprietary (and at the time groundbreaking) technology. CMOS sensors, the experts tell us, are susceptible to image noise (repetitive image artefacts), which in turn degrades quality, especially at higher ISO speeds.
While I consider myself a skilful, if not professional, photographer, I did find my random selection of scenes and exposures (using the 10D’s centre-weighted average metering setting) resulted in “some” blown highlights in “some” situations, typically where the dynamic range of the scene exceeded the dynamic range of the sensor. On closer examination I could have corrected the scenes with a touch of exposure compensation, but even so, the 10D is less forgiving when it comes to preventing your highlights from “clipping”.
A common complaint levelled at the 10D – and the D60 and D30 before it – is the apparently “soft” look to its pictures straight out the camera. This is probably the single biggest eye-opener for new DSLR users, at least with Canon DSLRs, especially those upgrading to a DSLR from a compact digital camera.
Fellow 10D users have already confirmed what I discovered in using the 10D myself: the camera is quicker off the mark and quicker in action than the D60 and D30, significantly faster in the case of the latter.
The 10D has also improved on the D60’s smart buffer system, and is now able to record a burst of nine consecutive images as opposed to eight before the buffer fills up. Since I mostly photograph natural subjects, this was not an issue even with the D30, although in testing this feature I was able to carry on shooting up to 20 images in Large/Fine JPEG mode without overloading the buffer.
Image quality and “purity” is always the first and most critical aspect of any digital camera review, and without doubt the 10D picks up where the D60 left off, producing film-like quality with no perceivable noise, even at higher ISO speeds. But image quality alone doesn’t make for a great camera.
Image-wise, the 10D is not very forgiving when exposing highlights (made even more difficult by the lack of a spot meter), and there are no options for less subtle sharpening for reduced post-processing. That said, skilled photographers should have no problems with overexposure, and even less skilled photographers need only glance at their histograms to adjust exposure levels in an instant. 10D images lack nothing in detail, and are, to my eye, more refined than what I got from the D60. Colours are certainly more neutral, but nothing that some curves and the saturation slider in Photoshop can’t correct.
Quite simply, there is no camera in this class and in this price range that competes with the 10D on features, image quality, build, robustness and speed. Not without its shortcomings, the 10D will meet and exceed the needs of most photographers without breaking the bank, and coupled with the rich selection of Canon and third-party lenses – from cheap consumer glass to expensive professional-grade optics – it represents the best value in a digital SLR camera available today, and for many months to come.
Copyright © 2003