Canon EOS D30 review

The long-awaited launch of the Canon EOS D30 camera raised expectations simply by being a late entrant in its field.

For a major manufacturer to be years behind competitors such as Nikon and Fuji, Canon had to be up to something. And, indeed, it was; not only does this camera offer every feature you could wish for, it also promises top quality at an affordable price.

The camera is supplied with a USB cable, power adaptor-cum-battery charger, a mains power adaptor, 16Mb CompactFlash card, browser software and Photoshop 5 LE, together with PhotoStitch for creating panoramas.

The Canon EOS D30 is a single-lens reflex camera compatible with the EOS system, which means it will support any of the near-100 lenses so far introduced. For Canon EOS owners, the camera not only slots neatly into their existing systems, but when they pick it up they will find themselves in familiar territory.

The camera holds and handles very much like other EOS cameras. It's pretty compact and light - in fact, it's the smallest of all interchangeable lens SLR digital cameras. The range of settings available is as wide as anyone could wish for; from totally automatic, through sets for subject types such as sports or close-ups, through to auto-exposure modes of different priorities, and on to full manual. You can also override exposure settings and choose different metering patterns. It turns out 3-megapixel images measuring 2160 x 1440 pixels from a sensor the same size as the APS C (Advanced Photo System Classic) format. This means that the 35mm equivalent focal length (35efl) is 1.6x longer than on 35mm film.

Feature presentation

In addition to the traditional camera controls, there's a panoply of buttons and a large control wheel that handle the digital side via an LCD screen on the back of the camera. Navigating the menus and choices is fairly straightforward, but turning the wheel isn't the most intuitive way to move through the menu choices.

On the other hand, you can't complain about the choice you have - it's very comprehensive and we could think of nothing that wasn't covered. You can even set a range of custom functions, and there's a quick key that improves usability significantly. The LCD not only displays information about the camera settings, but it can also show histogram and full data about the image, including camera settings. This makes it an excellent teaching/learning tool.

For reviewing images, the screen isn't the fastest at displaying and the method of showing a magnified view is inelegant. One excellent feature is that a quick dab at the shutter button immediately returns the camera to picture-taking mode.

The camera activates quickly and can fire about 12 frames in five seconds without pausing for breath. This load of 12 images, at minimum compression, takes a further minute or so to write to the storage before it can be displayed. It's a very impressive performance. Autofocus response from the three AF sensors is as rapid as you'd expect with Canon lenses - perhaps not quite up to the speed of the professional EOS-1 cameras, but there's nothing to complain about.

The images are stored on a CompactFlash card or IBM MicroDrive, and communication with the Mac is via USB. Installation of the ImageBrowser is a breeze, delivering a capable browser that can actually do more than load images. The browser is needed to convert the raw image files to TIFF, which it did rather slowly. One quirk of its Mac interface is that it didn't recognise the desktop as a separate folder, so every folder is listed at root, which is confusing. The browser also presents slide shows and supports printing.