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Canon EOS-10D Canon revamps their hugely popular D60 SLR, with ahost of improvements and a dramatic price cut! Select a topic Reference: Datasheet EOS-10D Sample Images EOS-10D Photo Gallery! --------------------------------- 1. Intro and Highlights 2. Executive Overview 3. Design 4. Viewfinder 5. Optics 6. Exposure & Flash 7. Shutter Lag & Cycle Time Tests 8. Operation & User Interface 9. Camera Modes & Menus 10. Image Storage & Interface 11. Video, Power, Software 12. Test Results & Conclusion --------------------------------- Print-Friendly Review Version Additional Resources and Other Links Reader Comments on EOS-10D Review --------------------------------- Digital Camera Comparometer (TM) --------------------------------- <-- Digital Cameras (Home) <-- Digital Camera Reviews Index <<Optics :(Previous) | (Next): Shutter Lag & Cycle Time Tests>> Page 6:Exposure & Flash Review First Posted: 02/27/2003

Exposure

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Like the EOS D30 and D60 before it, the EOS 10D provides as little or as much exposure control as you could want. Standard exposure modes include the usual Program, Aperture-Priority, Shutter-Priority, and full Manual modes, as well as some "Image Zone" (scene-based preset) modes, and one of the most unique (and useful) modes I've yet seen, an Automatic Depth-of-Field mode. The "Image Zone" exposure modes include Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Sports, Night Portrait, and Flash Off modes. These modes preset a variety of camera parameters to make it easier for non-expert photographers to achieve good exposures in a variety of standard shooting situations. The new Flash Off mode simply disables the flash and external Speedlite (if attached), and puts the camera under automatic exposure control. The full Auto mode takes over all camera functions, turning the 10D into a very easy to use point and shoot camera, albeit a very capable one.

The Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority modes work much the same as on any other camera, allowing you to adjust one exposure variable while the camera selects the other for the best exposure. A Custom menu setting enables a "safety shift," which automatically adjusts the exposure to compensate for sudden changes in brightness. Program mode keeps both variables under automatic control, while Manual mode gives you control over everything. The Automatic Depth-of-Field mode (A-DEP) uses all seven autofocus zones to determine the depth of field in the active subject area. Once it has determined the range of focusing distances present across the seven zones, it automatically computes the combination of aperture and shutter speed needed to render the nearest and furthest points in sharp focus. This is a remarkably useful feature, even for professional photographers. In many situations, you want to keep several subjects in focus, while at the same time trying for the highest shutter speed (largest aperture) that will permit that. In practice, faced with such situations, I've usually resorted to just picking the smallest aperture feasible and hoping for the best. With the 10D's A-DEP mode, the camera takes the guesswork out of this process and gives you the fastest shutter speed it can manage while still keeping things in focus. (In playing with this, I was often surprised by how large an aperture in fact would work. I frequently would have chosen a much smaller aperture to stay on the safe side.)

A new feature on the EOS 10D is an ISO speed extension, which increases the 10D's maximum ISO speed to 3,200. (Default ISO is 100, other normal options are 200, 400, 800, and 1,600.) For adjusting the exposure, the 10D's Exposure Compensation setting increases or decreases overall exposure from +/-2 EV in either one-half or one-third EV increments. The default step size is 1/2 EV, but you can set an increment of 1/3 EV via the camera's Custom menu. (Frankly, I've always found that one-third EV compensation is just about ideal for digicams. One-half EV steps are just too broad to set critical highlight exposures accurately.) Automatic exposure bracketing on the EOS 10D lets you set the total exposure variation (across three shots) at anywhere from +/- 1/2 or 1/3 EV all the way up to +/- 2 EV. The nice part is that the automatic variation is centered around whatever level of manual exposure compensation you have dialed in. Thus, you could set positive compensation of 0.7EV, and then have the camera give you a variation of +/- 2/3 EV around that point. Whatever EV step size is set through Custom menu also sets the bracketing step size.

I really like the amount of information the 10D gives you about its exposure, not only in terms of the settings it's using, but in the form of feedback on how pictures you've captured turned out. You can select an "Info" display mode when viewing captured images on the rear-panel LCD screen, which produces the display shown at right. Notable here is that you not only can see all the exposure parameters, but you get excellent feedback on the tonal range of the image itself. One form of feedback is the histogram display at upper right, which shows how the tonal values are distributed within the image. Histogram displays are useful for directly seeing how the overall exposure turned out in an image, but I've found them to be of limited usefulness for making critical judgments about highlight exposure.

Digital cameras need to be exposed more or less like slide film, in that you need to zealously protect your highlight detail. Once you've hit the limit of what the sensor can handle, the image "clips" and all detail is lost in the highlight areas. The problem is that it's quite common for critical highlights to occupy only a very small percentage of the overall image area. Because they correspond to such a small percentage of the total image pixels, the peak at 100 percent brightness can be very hard to distinguish in the histogram display. To handle such situations, the 10D blinks any pixels that are 100 percent white on its screen, alternating them between black and white. This makes localized overexposure problems leap out at you, making it very easy to control the critical highlight exposure precisely. (The sample image shown in the display above is a pathological example, chosen to show how the feature works. In practice, you'd probably never overexpose an image that badly.)

Besides the abovementioned exposure information and feedback, the 10D's playback options include a thumbnail index display, normal full-frame viewing of captured images, and a zoomed view, as shown at right. There's also a "jump" mode, activated via the Jump button on the rear panel of the camera. Jump mode lets you very quickly move through images stored on the memory card, jumping 10 shots at a time. The zoomed playback option is another area where the 10D improves greatly on the performance of the D60. The D60 had only a 3x fixed zoom level, and you could only view 9 separate segments of the image, moving stepwise between them. In contrast, the E10D's image playback can be zoomed in very small steps anywhere from 2-10x. Once you've zoomed in at any level, you can scroll the zoomed window all around the image area, using the large rear-panel control dial and one of the rear-panel buttons to control direction and movement. Very slick, a welcome improvement!

Another feature deserving comment is the 10D's separation of the autoexposure and autofocus lock functions. In consumer-level digicams, half-pressing the Shutter button locks exposure and focus simultaneously. You can use this to deal with an off-center subject by pointing the camera at the subject, locking exposure and focus, and then reframing the picture before finally snapping the shutter. The only problem is that you sometimes need to perform a more radical recomposition of the subject in order to determine the proper exposure. For instance, you may want to zoom in on the subject, grab an exposure setting, and then zoom back out before taking the picture. Situations like that require locking the exposure independently of the focusing, and the 10D provides for just such eventualities by way of a separate AE lock button on the back of the camera, right under your right thumb. A very handy feature indeed, for those times you need it.

The EOS 10D offers a full range of White Balance settings, including six presets, an Auto setting, Custom setting, and Kelvin temperature setting. The six presets include Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, and Flash. The Custom setting bases color balance on a previous exposure, meaning you can snap an image of a gray card and base the color temperature on that image. The Kelvin temperature setting lets you get even more specific, and offers a range of temperatures from 2,800 to 10,000 degrees Kelvin. A White Balance bracketing option snaps three images at different color balances, much like the Auto Exposure Bracketing feature. Bracketing steps are from -/+ 3 stops in whole-stop increments. (Each stop corresponds to 5 mireds of a color conversion filter.) The EOS10D also offers a Parameters option through the LCD menu, which lets you select Adobe RGB color space, or set up as many as three Parameters setups. Each setup lets you adjust Contrast, Sharpness, Saturation, and Color Tone, but the custom setups are all based on the sRGB color space. The white balance bracketing and Adobe RGB color space option are both new features on the 10D.

Low Light Capability
When operating the camera in full-manual exposure mode, the EOS 10D offers a Bulb exposure setting for very long exposures. Normally, exposure times are limited to a maximum of 30 seconds in Aperture- or Shutter-Priority modes, but in Manual mode, you can expose for as long as 999 seconds by selecting Bulb mode and holding down the Shutter button for as long as you want the shutter to remain open. Obviously, 999-second exposures aren't a practical reality, as sensor noise will totally swamp the signal long before that point is reached. Still though, the 10D seems quite able to take very long exposures with very little image noise resulting. - Like the D60, the 10D employs noise reduction algorithms that automatically reduce excess image noise from long exposures.

A full discussion of image sensor noise is beyond the scope of this review, but the simple story is that the most obvious and objectionable noise you'll see in long digicam exposures is so-called "fixed pattern" noise, caused by variations in "dark current" between sensor pixels. "Dark current" is just what it sounds like. Current (a signal) appears even when the sensor isn't being exposed to light. When you look at a long time exposure shot with a digital camera, you'll often see very bright pixels, where minor manufacturing defects have resulted in unusually high "dark current" levels. Often called "hot pixels," these flecks of color are very distracting visually.

The normal way to deal with hot pixels is to take an exposure with the camera's shutter closed, immediately after shooting the subject. If this "dark frame" is exposed for the same time as the subject was, you can largely eliminate the hot pixel problem by subtracting the dark frame information from the actual exposure. In practice, this works fairly well, but has the disadvantage that you have to wait for the dark frame exposure to be taken, requiring an appreciable amount of time in the case of long time exposures. (If you shot a one-minute exposure for the photo itself, you'll have to wait another minute for the dark frame exposure to be made.)

While most other high-end digicams on the market use a dark frame subtraction method to deal with image noise, the 10D (like the D60 before it) appears to be doing something very different, as there's very little delay between the end of the primary exposure and the writing of the image file to the memory card. There's clearly no "dark frame" exposure involved. I suspect that this advanced noise reduction processing in the 10D is another consequence of the "active pixel" CMOS technology Canon developed internally. Having active circuitry associated with each pixel in the sensor array allows lots of fancy processing that would be impossible otherwise, and it looks like Canon's noise reduction system takes advantage of this.

What's up with RAW?

Like many high-end digicams, the has a "RAW" file format as an option. If you're new to the world of high-end digital cameras, you may not be familiar with the concept of the "RAW" file format. Basically, a RAW file just captures the "raw" image data, exactly as it comes from the camera's CCD or CMOS image sensor. So why would you care about that? - RAW files let you manipulate your images post-exposure without nearly as much loss of image quality as you'd get with JPEG files. A full discussion of RAW file formats is way beyond the scope of this article, but Charlotte Lowrie of MSN Photo has written an excellent article describing the benefits of the RAW format, titled A Second Chance to Get It Right. Check it out, it's one of the clearest tutorials on RAW formats I've seen yet.

Flash
The EOS 10D's built-in flash has a guide number rating of 43 feet (13 meters) at ISO 100, translating to a range of about 15 feet at ISO 100 with a f/2.8 lens. (Reasonably powerful, but not dramatically so.) The 10D gives you a great deal of control over flash exposure, allowing you to adjust flash and ambient exposure independently of each other, in one-half or one-third EV increments. This makes it very easy to balance flash and ambient lighting for more natural-looking pictures. The camera also boasts a custom function for "Auto Flash Brightness Reduction" (Custom Function 14) which is particularly useful when using the flash for fill illumination in daylight shooting conditions. With this mode enabled, if the ambient light is above a certain level, the camera will assume you're using the flash in a "fill" mode, and will automatically back off its intensity a bit, to avoid washing out the natural lighting.

Another nice touch was the Flash Exposure Lock button, which fires the flash under manual control before the actual exposure, to determine the proper exposure setting. This struck me as very handy, akin to the more conventional autoexposure lock function for handling difficult ambient lighting conditions. A Flash Exposure Compensation feature controls the flash exposure +/- 2 stops in 1/2 or 1/3-stop increments.

Several of the more impressive features of the Canon flash system depend on the dedicated 550 EX speedlight. (While a number of Canon speedlights will work just fine with the 10D, their previous top-end 540EX unit apparently does not, so you'll need the new 550EX to fully tap the 10D's flash potential.) Among these are true FP (focal plane) flash sync, flash exposure bracketing with external flash units, and flash modeling. FP sync requires a flash unit to provide uniform light output for a relatively long period of time, long enough for the focal plane shutter curtain to fully traverse the "film" plane (sensor plane in the case of the 10D). On the 10D, this requires a flash duration of 1/200-second. Uniform, long-duration flash pulses like this permit use of shutter speeds as high as the 1/4,000-second maximum that the 10D is capable of. This can be invaluable when you want to exclude ambient light from the exposure.

Here's the rundown on Canon Speedlights and their compatibility with the 10D:

 

Speedlight Model	On-Camera Capability	E-TTL Wireless Compatibility
550EX	All	Master or Slave
480EG	External auto plus manual operation	None
540EZ	Manual operation only	None
430EZ	Manual operation only	None
420EX	All	Slave Only
420EZ	Manual operation only	None
380EX	All	None
220EX	All	None
200E	Not Compatible	None
160E	Not Compatible	None
MR-14EX Macro Ring	All	Master Only
MT-24EX	All	Master Only
ST-E2 transmitter	E-TTL, attach to camera	Master Only
Non-dedicated shoe-mount units	Manual operation only	n/a
Studio strobe packs	Manual operation only, connect via threaded PC sync socket on camera body	n/a

 

You'll note the references to "E-TTL remote" capabilities in the table above. Canon's Speedlight system permits TTL flash metering with multiple remote units, and even allows you to set differential power ratios between the slaved units, over a six-stop flash exposure range.

The "Flash Modeling" feature of the 550EX speedlight is quite useful. With a F550EX connected to the 10D, pressing the camera's Depth of Field Preview button causes the speedlight to fire at 70 flashes per second for about one second. This creates the illusion of a constant light source for your eyes, letting you preview the lighting on your subject when the flash fires. VERY handy, and likely to save lots of shoot/check/reshoot time!

As alluded to above, the "X-sync" speed of the 10D is 1/200-second. (This is the maximum shutter speed that can be used on the 10D when working with a non-dedicated, FP-capable speedlight.) When used with higher-powered studio strobe systems, Canon recommends a maximum shutter speed of 1/60-second or slower, to accommodate the time/intensity profile of such units. Finally, via a Custom menu setting, you can program the 10D to use a shutter speed of 1/200-second in Aperture-Priority exposure mode regardless of ambient light levels. (I guess this is useful, if you know you're going to be hopping in and out of flash mode, but other than a convenient preset for the shutter speed, it's little different than simply using Manual mode to set both shutter speed and aperture.)

A final benefit of the dedicated Canon speedlights is that they carry powerful autofocus assist illuminators that can extend the range of the built-in AF assist light of the 10D. The AF assist beam on the 550EX is rated as good to about 50 feet, versus the roughly 13 feet of the lamp on the 10D itself. (Note that the ST-E2 wireless sync transmitter can also be used for AF assist during non-flash photography, a handy trick.)

Overall, I was very impressed with how well the 550EX worked in concert with the EOS-10D. Thanks to the true TTL flash metering, exposures were always spot-on, no matter what sort of wild bounce/diffusion combinations I was experimenting with. The flash exposure compensation control also provided very fine-grained control over the balance between flash and ambient illumination. Very impressive.

Continuous Shooting Mode and Self-Timer
Among digital SLRs currently on the market, the 10D comes in about midway in terms of shooting speed, very competitive with units it'll be stacked up against in the marketplace. The Continuous Shooting mode is rated by Canon at three frames per second, a number that matched almost exactly my own tests (which showed a frame rate of 2.94 seconds). This is about on a par with the 2.88 frames per second of the Fuji S2 Pro, and Nikon D100, but a good bit slower than the blazing eight frames per second of Canon's own EOS-1D. Fast enough for you? You'll have to be the judge of that. Professional sports shooters will doubtless want more (they being a primary target of the EOS-1D), but for most situations, I expect the 10D will be plenty fast enough.

The camera's Drive setting also accesses a Self-Timer mode, which opens the shutter 10 seconds after the Shutter button is pressed, giving you time to dash around in front of the camera.