Canon EOS Rebel XTi user reviews (With EF-S 18-55mm Lens, Black)

Pros Light weight and great beginner camera

Cons color balance is wierd and not as vibrant as competitors

Summary This camera is great for beginners and from my experience, beginners only. I have noticed that pictures are not as vibrant in color as leading Nikon cameras. This camera, as well as other Canon cameras, is great for action/sport shots due to its shutter and aperture settings. Overall this camera was a great start I recommend it to first time shooters.

Pros Easy to use and great picture quality

Cons None that I have found yet

Summary This has been a fantastic camera, prior to purchasing I did my home work and found a site called www.alatest.com, which had both user reviews as well as expert reviews from many well know and trust worthy sources, plus they rated it with what they call the alaSCORE........and my camera had a rating of 100! It pays to hear what the experts have to say before purchasing any product and alatest lists thousands!

Pros Good to go right out of the box.

Cons None , maybe the lens cap could use some nylon string.

Summary I charged the battery, Read the manual while it was charging. Made my setup on the camera, and Wow Super great Pics. I reccomend this camera to everyone.

Pros Big screen, user friendly interface, superb quality pictures

Cons Lack of spot metering, slow flash sync (1/200), no lenses with 18-135 or 18-200 ramge, no image stabilization.

Summary I bought this camera after using both of its predecessors (Rebel abd Rebel Xt). Response is superb. Picture quality is fantastic. CNET review mentioned the lack of the second LCD as a disadvantage. I beg to differ. Nikon D80 (which is actually not their entry level and so not a fair comparision. Nikon D40X is their entry level) has 2 screens but it does not make any sense to have an extra screen just for the sake of it. On D80 I had to look at the small and unclear second display for all the settings, while the large display is sitting there doing nothing (may be I did not explore it enough or may be there is an option to set it to show the settings on the large display screen). XTi showed all its settings on the large display, very clearly. The auto turn off of the display when you bring it close to the eye is useful not to interfere with your view as well as to save power (when hanging on your neck). The second display on D80 stinks. The zero on it is a cut up lower half of 8 rather than a full 0, which is really annoying. D80 has more buttons and dials than Xti and yet most adjustments need two button operation. XTi is able to achieve the same functions with fewer buttons, that are intuitive. Except a few functions most are single button operations. The hand grip feel and the placement of buttons is partly a matter of design and partly subjective. I felt more comfortable with XTi and some of my friends felt more comfortable with D80. But as far as the design goes, I feel that Canon is a clear winner. I just do not see the need to have 2 dials on D80 to adjust aperture and shutter speed. D80 gave the option of adjusting ISO sensitivity in small increments as opposed to only doubling on XTi and I think that is a nice feature on D80.

Image quality is excellent on both. The reviews tend to favor D80 slightly, but I am not sure if that is not a bias towards the Nikon brand. But I admit that I do not have the object methods of testing the picture qualit and so will not comment on that further.

D80 does not come with RAW editing software, which is really annoying. What is the use of having an SLR, if you can not take RAW pictures. It does not matter to me, because I use Aperture and sometimes iPhoto. Lightroom is even better. So I do not use even the canon's RAW editing program (even though the camera came with it), but I just feel that I should not have to pay extra to get RAW editing after buying an expensive digital SLR.

My complaints include the following. It does not have a spot metering mode. Sore spot!! Sony's A100 comes with on-camera image stabilization. The flash sync is limited to 1/200, which is also very annoying. You can not use flash to lighten the harsh shadows in bright daylight. Pictures tended to have slightly greener shift, but the white balance adjustments on camera are phenominal. There is an option to shift the white balance in all four directions (blue & yellow and green & magenta. Range of lenses is good with Canon, but there is no 18-135 or 18-200 available.

What I really would like to see: Spot metering, high speed flash sync, the above mentioned lenses. On-camera optical stabilization is welcome. With steadily increasing number of focus points, I would like to be able to choose the focusing point by looking at the subject through the view finder, rather than having to adjust with buttons before taking a picture. Having said that, it may be too much too early to ask for something like that on an entry level dSLR!