I am a schoolmaster at a major public school with 30 years experience. I have 3 delightful daughter...
I am a schoolmaster at a major public school with 30 years experience. I have 3 delightful daughters and my other interests include photography, gardening and cooking. I help with www.biologymad.com for A-level biologists.
Member since:22.01.2005
Reviews:22
I bought a Canon 20D after years and years as a semi-pro photographer, working for a public school on their publicity shots. I therefore had a large number of Canon-fit lenses and wanted a digital camera that would utilise them.
Hence my buying a Canon 20D a year ago. For reasons even I do not fully understand, I bought two! :-0
My first impressions were that Canon had, once again, done their usual trick of making a camera that is all but unuseable without the additional battery pack (it simply DOES NOT FIT your hands!) - so BEWARE as the BP costs an additional £120 or so and adds HUGE weight to the camera.:-(
That said, the resulting 'brick' is an
ABSOLUTE DELIGHT to hold and use - both horizontally and vertically, for the battery pack gives you an additional shutter release button. It also comes with a fitting which enables the use of 4 AA type batteries, should the main batteries go flat on you. BUT how often will you remember to have the fitting with you when the batteries run down.... yeah, so it's a good idea in theory, less so in practice.:-
The camera has Canon's 'program' wheel, allowing you to chose an 'idiot' mode for the subject you are photographing, but I rarely use it (see below) and prefer instead the 'P' setting, where the camera is set up as I like!
The camera takes RAW images as well as JPEGs of varying quality and one of the best features is that the camera writes to the CF card VERY quickly indeed and has the ability to take a 'machine-gun-like' burst of shots before writing them - around 5fps is REALLY quick!
I use this feature a lot, and I also appreciate the all but instantaneous shutter release. Coupled with brilliantly quick autofocus (with USM lenses), you have a camera ideally suited for soccer photography, which has become my main 'profssional' use of this camera, as, once again, I am the 'pro' at a major public school.
I must emphasise that the use of USM lenses is a MUST - those from Tokina, Sigma and Vivitar are cracking lenses but far too slow to be used in the fast-action stuff I now do, though my other lenses are fine for landscape work.
The x1.6 factor for all 35mm lenses is a drawback too - no question - as it is not posible to buy really wide-angle lenses without taking out a second mortgage! True, my 19-35mm lens can have a x0.5 fitting added, but I have not bought this.... yet! The usual excuse is that, with digital, you can 'stitch' shots together to make a panorama, but that is simply not the same as using a really decent wide-angle lens.
The plus point of the x1.6 factor is that a 75-300mm becomes a 450+mm lens and is ideal for sports stuff! I have also realised that my old 28-210mm Tokina lens is just not sharp enough to use with this camera. Fine on an Eos 10 at 7x5, but not good enough with a digital camera where cropping makes a 16x10 sized (original) print quite normal for an A4-sized print.
People are too hung up on megapixels. 8meg is MORE than enough - the real killer with digital cameras is that, whether it is 1 or 25 MP, you are limited to 256 tones from full dark to full bright (for each of RBG) - compared to '000's for the human eye. Thus, your digital print will NEVER have the subtle depth of tones that you find with a medium format camera. The next step will be to go to 1024 shades, but that will create files 12x bigger than today, and, until we have ultra-fast storage systems, that would make the camera too slow to use. The buttons, dials and adjustment wheels are all well placed for easy use, but the camera is so adaptable that it can take many hours of use to remember EXACTLY how to find the settings that you want!
ONE OTHER DRAWBACK is that older, EZ-series flashguns WILL NOT WORK with this camera (except in fully-manual mode) so one needs to buy a new EX-series flash - another £200+ expense!
So, the headline figure is £500 or so for a near-new camera on eBay and £650 in the shops, but to that you must add £100 for the battery pack and £200 for a new flash, PLUS the cost of replacing any non USM lenses you had and thought were OK. In short, it is a £grand+ camera!!! Am I happy with the camera - unquestionably, yes. Do I think it is misguided of Canon to make older flashes not compatible - yes too.
If you have £1000 to spend on a camera and have Canon-fit lenses in your bag, then this is, without question, the camera for you.
Oh, and one other point. Taking pictures is easy with this camera, but the procesing of 200+ shots on your PC at the end of an afternoon's shooting, to get 50 suitable for public viewing, is very, very time-consuming! Allow 5mins or so for each shot and you get some idea...
(then you have the Gym sub, to pay for the weight-training needed to carry the camera about!!) HD2
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Good, knowledgeable review. (Though I always think with camera reivews, it's interesting to see a few sample shots. But that's mainly because I'm nosy.) Paul
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leebo87 26.08.2006 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Canon EOS 20D
Oct 22nd, 2006
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