Canon 450D - First Impressions

For two and a bit years, I had a Canon 350D, the digital SLR that, at times, it seemed every geek owned. I even
wrote a couple of posts here about SLRs in general. Unfortunately, with 35,000 exposures on the clock, it was stolen in November, and I've only just got around to replacing it.

The good thing about the wait is that I was able to skip a generation, getting the new Canon 450D (known as the Digital Rebel XSi in the US), which was announced in January and started shipping late in April. It's been out long enough for DP Review, and presumably others, to review it, and I'm not in the same league, so this is more of an impressionistic review of the first week or so with one.

A large part of the reason I bought the 450D rather than saving quite a lot of money and sticking with the 400D was that it comes with a new kit lens, the 18-55IS (not to be confused with the much faster, much more expensive, 17-55IS). So far I've not noticed much change, but it does seem a little sharper, and the IS is helping a bit with low-light exposures. Certainly it's good enough, for now, that I've barely used the 28-135IS lens that became something of a mainstay on the 350D. We'll see how that pans out in the future, but for now, count me satisified.

Another one of the best features of the camera is one that won't appear on most people's spec lists, namely the viewfinder, and it's gorgeous. My memories of using the 350D were of a dim, cramped window through which to compose, with little in the way of guidance. In contrast, the 450D is much more open, much brighter, and (although this isn't strictly the viewfinder) has more information available to boot - ISO is now shown in the status bar, as well as on the back screen. Along with the lens, this was a key reason for me to choose the 450D, and it hasn't disappointed. Speaking of ISO, there's now an "auto ISO" option even in the "Creative Zone" exposure modes, which means that you can stop worrying about underexposing things so much. Nikon have had this since at least the D70, and I'm glad it's finally percolated through Canon's range.

One more minor change that I'm surprisingly fond of is the option not to rotate images on LCD playback. Both cameras had rotation sensors - a feature I really miss on my Fuji F30 - but the new camera has an option to ignore that on playback, which is fine for me. It's easier to rotate the camera, but see the picture full size, than it is to fiddle with zooming in to try and maximise the viewed area.

What else has changed from the 350D to the 450D? Well, there's sensor cleaning - which was also in the 400D - which I'm really not in a position to judge yet. Mind you, the 350D got quite grubby quite quickly, and anything to help prevent that is welcome. There's also 9 point autofocus, up from 7 on my older camera. Unfortunately, I never got on with Canon's "focus where you're looking" magic autofocus technology, so I rapidly set the 350D to focus on the centre point, and used AF lock to recentre the camera if I needed to. The 450D hasn't really changed anything here, and I was somewhat relieved to see DPReview mention the problem in their conclusions. It's not just me, then.

I suppose the big new headline features are the 12MP sensor and Live View. The former is of little concern to me - most of my images end up on Flickr, and the 350D's 8MP was fine for what prints I bothered with. I was tempted by the latter feature, though, which promises to let you use the LCD rather than the viewfinder for compositions. Well, it works, but the focus is pretty slow. It's probably going to be most useful for astrophotography, where the camera doesn't focus anyway (you have to fiddle with the telescope instead), and that's fine with me. If you were hoping to use the SLR like a point and shoot, though, don't bother. Get a Powershot G9, Ricoh GX100 or Sigma DP1 instead.

Other quibbles? Well, The 450D has a new type of battery, but the charger still just reports "charging" and "charged" - there's no time estimates, unlike the high-end SLRs. It also takes a different type of memory card (SD not CF, since you ask) but since all of those got stolen with my old camera, that wasn't a big deal for me, and since 2GB cards are cheap, you'd have to have a lot of an investment to care. (This is probably a bigger problem for people using the 450D as a second body with a high-end camera than it is to most consumers, who'll only have one or two 1GB CF cards anyway.) I've also found the metering to be a bit problematic, but that might be just me getting used to the camera, and also possibly me misunderstanding the new spot metering feature. I probably need to come back to that.

One final thing that I hadn't realised is that Apple's OS level support for RAW formats doesn't cover the 450D, even with today's release of Mac OS X 10.5.3. There's Canon's own tools, and Camera Raw 1.4.1 knows how to deal with them, but if you're using either Aperture or iPhoto, you're stuck with JPEG for now. No doubt this will be fixed, but it's hard to tell when - it could be in a standalone RAW update soon, or in the next OS revision, which might be three months away. (Edit: turns out that within a couple of hours of posting this, Apple posted RAW Compatibility Update 2.1, so that's that sorted.)

So, would I recommend the 450D? Well, it's tricky. Don't own an SLR, but want one? Now's a great time to buy, and I can't recommend the low-end Nikons because of the lack of a focus motor, so the 450D has to be worth a look. For people with a Canon SLR, it's trickier. There's probably not enough for 400D owners, but for those with 300Ds who haven't yet moved up to the 40D/5D, it's got to be worth considering. If you have a 350D, it's very finely balanced. Personally I'd probably have either waited, or gone with the 40D, taking my old lens with me. However, I can see Canon making just as much money from this camera as they did with its predecessors, and so far, I'm very happy with it.