Canon Digital Rebel XT

July 11th, 2005 | by David J Elrich

Performance

Once we loaded the memory card, slipped in the battery and made our basic adjustments (we shot in the Large JPEG mode), it was time to take some photos.  Setting the camera to Auto, we simply walked around the house, taking snaps of blooming flowers, fuzzy cats, trees and more.  The camera functioned like a dream.  Pressing the shutter halfway focused the camera and with another press, the image was captured.  Not only was the speed a joy, our results were dead-on with rich, accurate colors and very little distortion or purple fringing.  Even when pushing the ISO, noise was not that apparent until we hit 800 (1600 is the max).  We used the Burst mode (at three frames per second) to capture our cat jumping.  The battery delivered the power as advertised, but if you're going on a long trip an extra is recommended.  Since it uses a proprietary lithium ion battery, you simply can't pop in some AAs and keep shooting.  Be aware.

We imagine most photographers will keep the camera in full Auto mode but Canon (and other manufacturers) offers a ton of options including seven Program AE settings and manual adjustments for aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation, ISO, white balance and everything else a shutter bug would dive into headlong like a pool on a summer day.  For those who don't want to bother with tweaky manual settings, Program AE is a simple alternative.  You have a choice for Portrait, Landscape, Close-up (macro), Sports (high-speed shutter), Night Portrait and Flash Off.  These are the situations in which photographers find themselves most of the time and the camera makes the proper adjustments for you.  You simply turn the dial on the top of the camera to the appropriate position and you're set.  Turning the dial a bit more brings you to what Canon calls the "Creative Zone" for aperture- and shutter-priority modes, but we prefer to call it the "Tweak Zone." As someone who grew up on the legendary Nikon F2 35mm camera, I'm all for making adjustments galore, but now I'd rather let the camera do the work for me—especially when the results are so good.  The camera has a robust flash and an AF Assist mode for taking accurate shots of dimly lit scenes.  The AF Assist pre-flash is like a mini lightshow, so don't expect to get many candid shots!

I have a 12-in-1 card reader, so checking out my snaps on the computer was simple.  If you don't use a reader, the camera connects via a USB 2.0 Hi-Speed connection for speedy downloads (something you need when handling 8MB files!)  As noted, the Rebel XT comes with an extensive software bundle including a RAW file converter.  The ArcSoft Photo Studio 5.5 is actually a very nice editing program that lets you really fine-tune your images.