Digital Home Thoughts: A Week with the Canon 20D

A Candle in the Dark
Despite my tripod sitting two feet away from me, I decided to see how well this camera performs handheld in a low light situation. Canon claims that image quality on the 20D at ISO 1600 is comparable to the 10D shooting at ISO 400. While I didn't have a 10D to verify the difference, you can see by this photo that the 20D does do a good job.


Figure 1: These candles were shot at ISO 1600. Notice the lack of noise in the black areas. With my 300D, the black would have a bunch of colored static noise. This image was reduced from the native 3504x2306 pixels so some of the noise could be compressed down. See below for a 100% crop of the image.


Figure 2: This is a 400x267 section of the far candle in the image above which is called a 100% crop because it is the actual pixels at actual size. Notice the black area is still clean with little noticeable noise in the table or glass.

I spent the remainder of the rainy evening playing around with the camera. The built-in flash works in a pinch however, as with the 10D, 300D and most digital SLRs, an external flash is recommended for any serious shooting. The 20D is the first Canon camera to offer E-TTL II technology which basically translates to getting better exposures using a flash. Most flashes, both on-board and external, can be fooled by reflections or high contrast scenes and this new TTL, or through the lens technology, is supposed to make the flash smarter about how it interprets a scene. The main advantage is that it uses the focal length of the lens in its calculations. I did not see a huge difference with the built-in flash compared to my old camera - I'll have to do more testing once my new external flash arrives.

Rapid Fire
One noticeable difference between 20D and previous models is the shutter click. The 20D is much louder than previous models, pressing the button for a single frame emits a healthy ca-chunk. Reading through various camera forums it seems there is a mixed opinion about this. Wildlife shooters are worried it might scare the critters away, users of higher end digital and film cameras claim this is what a camera is supposed to sound like and the previous models sound like a children's toy in comparison. I personally find the shutter sound to be soothing in an abrupt sudden sort of way. I enjoy photographing birds in the early morning hours so I'll have to go out and see if it will really send them flying away; somehow I don't think it will make much of a difference.

The official spec says the camera can shoot 5 frames per second (up to 23 at a time). I was able to take about 35-40 consecutive large high quality jpeg shots before the camera stopped to breathe. That should be quite sufficient to catch the action in a variety of sports or wildlife situations. For those of you shooting in RAW or RAW+JPEG you will be slowed down to 6 frames in one burst.

I played around with the faster frame rate at a local park and took the shots shown below:


Figure 3: Capture the action frame by frame. The 20D will shoot 5fps and it can shoot and write to the card simultaneously. Although the focus is a bit off, these three shots illustrate why wildlife and sports shooters will enjoy the faster frame rate of the 20D.

The ability to shoot and write to the card at the same time is a new feature and makes the camera appear more responsive. On the 300D I often got a "Busy" message while the camera was catching up writing to the card. This problem has been alleviated with the 20D. Using a high speed CF card improves performance even more.

In addition to a faster frame rate, the 20D has a faster 1/8000 second shutter and a higher flash synch speed up to 1/250 second. Both of which provide even more creative flexibility when shooting action. Using certain Canon external EX flashes the flash will synch at high speed to the full 1/8000 of a second.