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Camera Review: Canon Rebel 450D
by Jim Austin, M.A., A.C.E.
CANON's REBEL 450D IS THE BEST REBEL YET -- This is a Rebel with a cause.
At first sight, you can easily fall for this new Rebel. The Rebel Xsi/450D is attractive: lightweight, smooth to handle, and fun to take with you on a shoot. The Rebel body comes in silver and black. It weighs only 1 pound, the same as a large can of soda. Its body sports a well-organized set of controls that make it easy to quench your thirst for creative imaging.
Reloaded with special features, the Rebel Xsi has an advanced complementary metal oxide semiconductor sensor, Highlight Priority, a Secure Digital memory card slot, and a 3.0 inch diagonal screen.
LARGER LCD SCREEN
Roughly the size of four screens on an earlier Rebel model put side by side, the liquid crystal display screen is large. Choose one of five levels of screen brightness, and you can see your pictures pop on the back of the Xsi, even in bright sunlight. The 4 screen options are well-designed. They let you set the background color of the LCD display. This allows your picture information to display with excellent color and contrast, so you can really see details of what you photographed. Translation: no more small and obscure picture information.
Just for fun, I measured the height and width of the LCD screen. Its height was 1 and 13/16ths of an inch. The width of the screen was 2 and 7/16ths of an inch. Any way you measure it, seeing your images on the Rebel's screen is a pleasure, especially for those of us who got used to squinting at our older camera display screens.
SMALLER MEMORY CARD
The Secure Digital (SD) card is a shade bigger than a postage stamp and the thickness of a quarter. You can buy one for the cost of getting a roll of film processed. Wal-Mart had a 4 gigabyte SD card for $27 in May of 2008; this card holds 250 images in RAW format. If you need more memory, Toshiba has unleashed a 32 gigabyte SD card. A proven format, the SD memory cards are labeled either SD, or HDSD, for high density SD memory card. The Rebel Xsi will work perfectly with either kind of card.
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HANDY FEATURES
* ISO FROM 100 TO 1600 IS WELL DESIGNED
Canon's new Rebel features an ISO range of 100 to 1600. A push-button control to change ISO is now right next to the shutter release button. Using this handy ISO button to change the setting to a higher or lower ISO can be done, with practice, without taking your eye from the viewfinder. Even at a high ISO settings like 800, image noise is acceptable in the test shots taken with the Rebel Xsi. This is good news for those photographers shooting high dynamic range sequences, where low noise is desirable.
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** PICTURE STYLES GIVE YOU OPTIONS
The reloaded Rebel offers a Picture Style mode. Touch the picture style button. You can now choose Monochrome, Landscape, Portrait or 3 other styles. Each one is a customized setting; the Portrait Picture Style, for instance changes saturation and sharpness to get great looking skin tones. Washington D.C. |
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*** HIGHLIGHT PRIORITY
If you want slightly more detail in the highlights of your picture, you can set the Rebel Xsi for Highlight Tone Priority, using the custom functions in the menu. This feature expands the range of highlights by about one stop, which adds a bit more detail to the highlights, and puts a little more noise in the shadows. The goal was to keep the highlights from blowing our while keeping detail in the shadows.
Here is a shot of the Instruction Manual in bright sunlight. Without highlight priority, my histograms showed blown out pixels in the white areas. With highlight priority enabled, there were no blown highlights. |
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NATURAL LOOKING FLASH
Natural looking flash exposures are made much easier with the Rebel Xsi. The camera employs E-TTL-II with an external flash. Canon calls this E-TTL-II, an abbreviation for "evaluative through the lens." The E-TTL-II means you get great results, even in tough lighting situations like portraits where you want lifelike skin tones.
Controlling a Canon external flash from the Rebel is easy. If you have a Speedlight Flash, you can use a menu setting on the Rebel to control the external flash options. Simply put, Canon's system compares the existing light in the room with light from a pre-flash burst, to calculate the exposure for your shot.
Shooting with my external flash controlled by the Rebel Xsi, I discovered that I wanted a little more external flash output, since Canon's ETTL-II is engineered to protect the highlights in the flash exposed scene. It's easy to boost or subdue the flash output settings for even, smooth shots with flash.
Wondering about compatibility? All Canon and Sigma E-TTL flashes (such as the Sigma EF-500 SUPER DG) are E-TTL-II compatible.
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EFFECTIVE OPERATING SOFTWARE (EOS)
When you order an Xsi, open the box and you'll see a battery, charger, drivers, instruction book, all the cables, and the Mac and Win software discs that all come with the Rebel Xsi. The software is provided in English, French and Spanish.
Installing the included software, you can customize what you need. So, you do not have to fill up your hard drive with programs you may not want to install. For example, I wanted to set up the 20 megabyte EOS utility to transfer pictures to my computer, but did not want to immediately load Digital Photo Professional, a 200 megabyte RAW processing program. Canon's custom installation software allows a choice of which software to use.
Better yet, installation of the EOS utility software took less than a minute. I use this EOS utility software every time I download, with the USB 2 download cable joining the Rebel Xsi to the computer. Why? This download method means that the SD card never comes out of the camera, and thus is not at risk of exposure to humidity or fingerprints. A CAMERA THAT CLEANS ITSELF ?
Ever suffer from dust that builds up on your camera sensor? The Rebel Xsi has a filter in front of the cmos sensor that prevents static dust from clinging to the sensor, and another system that shakes dust off the sensor when you turn the camera on or off. If that's not enough, the camera also has software that lets you delete shadows from dust after shooting, using the Digital Photo Professional version 2.2 software.
FOR PIXEL PEOPLE
The Rebel Xsi pixel count is 4272 by 2848, which amounts to 12.2 million pixels, an impressive level for a "consumer" camera. The camera's RAW capture mode creates a 15.3 megabyte image in Photoshop if you want to tweak.
LONG , LONG BATTERY LIFE
The LP-E5 battery for the Rebel Xsi has a durable battery life. The Canon Rebel Xsi battery has a capacity of 1080 milliamp-hours, says Canon tech guru Chuck Westfall. Excited Rebel owners are reporting 1000 to 1400 shots before they need to charge the battery.
CONCLUSION
I bought a black body Rebel Xsi/450D in March 2008, and plan to get a second one soon, because this is the best Rebel yet.
Jim Austin M.A. ,
A.C.E , is the author
An Adobe Certified Expert, Jim Austin has many HDR articles on Apogee, and teaches Photoshop for Photographers at the Apogee Online Campus. His HDR work is also featured at www.flickr.com/jimagesdigital/sets.
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