Digital Trends

Canon EOS Rebel XSi

May 6th, 2008 | by David Elrich

The rear is dominated by a 3-inch LCD, rated a solid 230K pixels. With the larger size and simple readouts, it’s a breeze checking out your settings and reviewing shots. This camera also has the traditional Live View, though we won’t bore you any more about how much we dislike this feature. Frankly, if you want to use your D-SLR’s LCD screen to frame images, buy a Sony alpha DSLR-A350 or –A300 – it’s that simple. Canon spends over 10 pages in the manual explaining the ins and outs of Live View, a feature best used with your camera on a tripod. With the Sony, you flick a switch and you’re good to go without a tripod. But we digress: We’ll spare you added rhetoric concerning Live View from Canon, Nikon and Olympus, other than to say it’s not worth talking about anymore.

The EOS Rebel XSi has a large, bright viewfinder which is lot faster and simpler to use anyway. There’s a diopter control to fine tune it to your eyesight and a soft rubber cushion surrounding three sides. Directly underneath is a sensor that turns off the LCD when you bring the camera up to your eye, saving the battery and preventing light from leaking into your field of view.

The rear has the controls found on most D-SLRs, except the larger screen forced Canon’s designers to move them to slightly different locations. Instead of a row of keys to the left of the LCD, they’re located on the right, which forced the camera’s creators to place the Menu and Display keys to the top left. This really isn’t a big deal though, as you’ll get used to the positions pretty quickly.

Image Courtesy of Canon

Along with exposure compensation, there’s a direct key for White Balance and others for Playback and Delete. There’s also a four-way controller with center Set button. The four points let you adjust settings for the flash, type of focus and burst/self-timer mode. One control is rather cryptic—it looks like a ceiling fan but actually it’s for Picture Styles (go figure). Picture Styles let you change the overall tone of the image. There’s Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful, Monochrome (B&W) and User Defined. These are not to be confused with Scene modes. Like Custom Image in the Pentax K200D, you can tweak these at your leisure to see if you like the effects of adjusting sharpness, contrast, saturation and color tone. Then again you can just shoot blissfully in Auto and be content—it’s your call, but it’s nice to know you can experiment.

Next to a textured finish where your thumb rests (a nice addition) are AE-Lock and AF point selection keys that also do double duty during playback (enlarging shots and so on).

On the right side is a compartment for the SD/SDHC card slot, while a flimsy door covers the video out, remote control and USB ports. On the bottom of this Made in Japan D-SLR is the battery compartment and metal tripod mount. The proprietary lithium-ion battery is rated 600 shots without the flash and 500 when using the flash 50 percent of the time, decent but not great numbers.

As always, Canon supplies everything you need other than an SD card (2GB will be fine to start). If you purchase the kit, you’ll get a 3x 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom, a good starter lens. Canon claims four full-stops of correction with its OIS system. The inclusion of this lens is a direct response to the many D-SLRs with built-in sensor shift systems that stabilize any attached lens. As we always say, competition is a wonderful thing—especially when consumers win.

Along with the various straps, caps, battery and recharger, you also get a 196-page owner’s manual, a pocket guide, booklets about IS and macro shooting as well as a CD-ROM with the EOS Digital Solution Disk (ver. 17.1) and another with the software instruction manual. The software helps you download, archive and edit images and develops RAW files.

After charging the battery, loading a 2GB card, setting the date and time, it was time see what the XSi could do.