Canon EOS 350D > Reviews > Great for beginners & advanced amateurs.

Author's product rating:   

Picture Quality	Excellent
Range & Quality of Features	Excellent
Ease of Use	Easy
Overall Look & Design	Good
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	small & lightweight, excellent image quality, good menus, battery life
Disadvantages:	small view finder, no ISO indicator, LCD difficult to see outdoors

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

The 350D is my first digital camera. Previously I used a Canon EOS 50E with a 28-105mm lens. I had wanted to move to digital for some time and was pretty sure I wanted to stay with Canon (but did consder Nikon too). However, I was torn between getting at top end "prosumer" compact like the Canon G6 or S70, or pulling out all the stops and getting the 350D. The G6/S70 route had a number of attractions, cost and size being at the top of the list. But the flexibilty of a DSLR was really tempting.

So I spent a number of weeks looking through online reviews and comparing sample shots from all 3 cameras. Whilst the G6 was good (better than the S70 I felt - which had soft corners at 28mm and lots of chromatic abberation), the image quality just didn't compare to the 350D samples (particularly when looking at high ISO noise). Next I went and played with them in jessops: the S70 seemed slow and bulky, you get the compromised performance of compact sized optics without the gains of a truely compact body. The G6 felt nice and was good to use, but side by side the size/weight wasn't far off a 350D.

Finally I bought a 350D with the 18-55mm kit lens. Got it from Dixons online (with some discount vouchers) for £599 delivered. The first thing i noticed after opening the box is that it rattles! Apparently it is normal - there are two metal arms/braces in the pop-up flash assembly, these are quite loose by design. Plus there is an orientation sensor inside that you can hear move around.

In the beginning, I struggled to get well focussed & exposed images. On reflection, I think that digital photograpy seems slightly less forgiving than the 35mm SLR workflow- with digital you see your images straight from the camera, and can zoom in close on your PC to see how sharp your photo REALLY is. Whereas with the 35mm route, my photos used to come back from Boots after being processing by a machine that auto-corrects exposure problems. Plus everything looks sharp on a 5"x7" print! So I had to tighten up my photo taking skills a little, but DSLR is an excellent way to practice - you can seen instantly what works and what doesn't.

A couple of months on, and all is good. I am really happy with my photos and the 350D is a pleasure to use. I use the kit lens, which is OK for price but can get a little soft if not used at f8-f11, but try to use my old 28-105mm when I can. This gives consistently sharp images. I shoot predominantly in RAW because I find it better suited to post-processing, but the fine JPEG setting looks every bit as good as a converted (& sharpened) RAW image. Impossibe to tell them apart.

In use the 350D is fast - feels just like using a 35mm SLR. THe menus are well thought out and easy to navigate. The only slight annoyance being that the ISO setting is not shown on the LCD screen, so you have to check in the menu to see the current setting. Having recently played with a 20D, I feel that the 350D navigator and button layout is far easier to use and the few extra features omitted from the 350D are really nothing to worry about.

Battery life is really good - it'll last days. It doesn't hurt to get a few spares. I have non-canon equivalents that work fine at a fraction of the cost.

The only downsides I can think of are as follows:

- the viewfinder isn't as big and bright as I am used to with the EOS 50E, but still perfectly useable.
- the finish on my black 350D is prone to marking - i.e. white powdery dust from handling - but this brushes off.
- the LCD screen isn't quite sharp enough to check close-up focus, but works well enough to check composition etc.
- it is difficult to see the LCD in bright sunlight, but is still useable for menu navigation.

And a general word of caution that applies to ALL DSLRs.... the imaging arrays get dusty. I hadn't appreciated that I would need to clean my sensor occasionally to get rid of dust. These show up at high f-stops as small black specks in your photo. You can blow them off using a hand blower (as per Canon instructions) but to get rid of all dust you really need to swab the sensor, quite nerve-wrecking process! Search internet for the "Copperhill" process for more info. To see if you have a dusty sensor, stop down to f22, shoot a blank piece of sky, then apply "Auto-levels" in whatever imaging package you use.

In conclusion:
A great bit of kit. Takes really good photos and is great for seasoned amateurs as well as those just moving to SLR photography. The only complaints are very minor, and are really of little concern in day-to-day use.