I don’t know if the photo experts will be appalled or enthralled, but Canon has taken some creative liberties with its latest digital single-lens reflex camera and that’s a good thing. The new EOS 50D doesn’t have the full-frame sensor that I was hoping for in my post last month “All I ask is a full-frame and a single mirror to sail her by.” But along with many more predictable new features, Canon has added some new picture taking modes that simplify the job of having your photos come out the way you want. It’s just the kind of innovation that camera makers and most of the gadget industry regularly forget about entirely in their race to add more and more features without stopping to consider the user experience.
Instead of just relying on the age-old aperture and shutter speed controls, the 50D includes two new modes called “creative auto” and “Automatic Depth-Of-Field.” The first one lets you set the brightness and the depth of field focus you desire and the camera’s computer decides how to balance the aperture size and shutter speed to attain that result. It’s basically removing an unneeded step in the old process, where you played around with the aperture and shutter speed setting in the hopes of ending up with your desired brightness and depth of field focus. The auto depth of field simply tells the camera to try to get the maxium focus on all subjects in view. Again, that’s an end result you might want and used to have to play around with other settings to achieve.
I’m also pleased that while Canon is still fighting the counterproductive megapixel wars — the 50D has 15.1 megapixels – they’re also addressing the detrimental effects caused by crowding more and more sensors onto the same size chip. Canon says it has redesigned several parts of the sensor and camera to reduce additional “noise” that the higher pixel density would otherwise have created. We’ll have to wait for the reviews to find out if Canon’s strategy succeeded so I certainly wouldn’t run out and buy the 50D the first day it’s available. It’s scheduled to hit store shelves in October. I haven’t seen any pricing yet but it should be Gizmodo says it’ll sell for $1399 without a lens, about in the ballpark of the year-old 40D model which is selling now for about $1,200.
Annoyingly, the rumor mill had Canon announcing the 50D as well as an update to it’s lowest-price “full frame” digital SLR, the aging EOS 5D released in 2005, or the mid-Paleolithic age in the world of digital photography. We only got the 50D today. The long-awaited 5D successor is still missing in action.
And, of course, for all things photo-related, I rely on the excellent web site Digital Photo Review, where I first read about the new 50D. Their comprehensive “first look” is worth a read.
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