Gizmo

Canon EOS Digital Rebel

My friend John, a.k.a. "ice weasel" on a popular online dating service, enjoys cooking continental cuisine, watching foreign films and listening to live music. But he told me the other day that he is thinking about taking up photography as a hobby to round out his interests. He says that he wants to take pictures of Paris sunsets or monks in Nepal to put on the walls of his new downtown condo.

So I introduced him to the Canon EOS Digital Rebel. The D-Rebel is an affordable, lightweight Single Lens Reflex (SLR) digital camera that takes high-resolution pictures and comes with a decent auto-focus lens. It's priced for a hobbyist but has some features that would make a paparazzi giggle like an over-sugared schoolgirl.

Just like its professional big brother, the 10D, the D-Rebel takes pictures at a massive 6.3 megapixels. That means the image that gets recorded is made up of more little dots of color than you will probably ever need. (Remember that a 3-megapixel camera can produce crisp 8" x 10" photos.) The image is large, clear and amazingly faithful to the subject being photographed. The camera is compatible with all the other AF lenses built for 35mm EOS cameras, and with such high resolution this may be the last digital camera you'll ever buy. (Okay, we know it won't be, thanks to your gadget fetish, but it's nice to pretend.)

Other nice features (for the photo geek) include being able to change the camera's sensitivity to light (or ISO setting) between shots. That allows you to take low-light pictorial essays of employees in various sleeping poses at their desks, or snaps of your spouse installing your new satellite dish. "That's it honey, just a couple of more degrees higher."

The D-Rebel has an all-plastic chassis and is light enough at 19.7 oz (560 grams) for pal John to hang from his neck on his travels. And it has a good LCD screen on the back to preview the picture the instant after it's taken. You can also zoom into the preview image by a factor of ten to check on whether everything is in focus.

Great action shots are also possible with this camera. At 2.5 frames per second in four-shot bursts, you can take action photos of Uncle Fred bowling over the grandkids when diving for the last of Aunt Gertie's butter tarts.

Newbies like John can leave the camera in auto mode and take consistently fine shots without ever cracking the manual. More adventurous souls may want to twist the settings dial to explore aperture or speed priority modes for more control. There is also a depth of field button that lets you know how deep your shot will be in focus.

If you wanted to complain about this cool camera, you could always grumble about how the LCD screen cannot be used as a viewfinder when taking photos — although that is not how SLRs work. Also, the LCD screen is a little dim. And the plastic chassis feels a bit fragile. You could also compare it to the 10D, its professional big brother, and belly-ache over how its ISO settings go only half as high (to 1600) as on the 10D (3200). But that's a whole lot of unreasonable whining. Frankly, the Digital Rebel is a really nice camera and for the money, it cannot be beat — at least not yet.

Expect to spend up to $1,599 including a lens (18-55mm) but excluding a memory card (CF I and II). Then again, also expect to love this camera — like I do — and like John does. It turns out monks in Nepal have funny grins, but you have to tell them knock-knock jokes first.

Price: $1,599 or $939 (U.S.), with an 18mm-55mm lens. Chassis only, $1,499 or $834 (U.S.).
More info: http://www.canoneos.com/digitalrebel/
Buy it: Canadian dealer locator at: http://www.canon.ca/english/index-dealerlocator.asp. U.S. dealer locator at: http://www.usa.canon.com/html/cdl/cdlWhereToBuy.jsp.

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Copyright © Cyberwalker Media Inc. 2004