Canon SL3 First Shots: The smallest and lightest DSLR from Canon struts its stuff in our lab

posted Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 11:48 AM EST

The Canon Rebel SL line has been popular for good reason, stemming from high quality features at a budget size and a budget price point. The new Canon SL3 comes in as the trimmest among them, and at a very reasonable starting price, yet sporting a new sensor and a new processor.

And the results for image quality? That's what our signature laboratory First Shots aim to answer!

For anyone new to our site, our First Shots are a series of images of our standard Still Life test target scene shot across a camera's available ISO range. These allow us to pixel-peep the relative sharpness and noise results as ISO rises, and to also compare the cameras to their predecessors and competition in our handy Comparometer.

To get you started down the I.Q. comparison road, below are side-by-side 1:1 crops from our Still Life images from the Canon SL3 as compared to the predecessor SL2 as well as a current competitor in the Nikon D3500, at both base ISO and ISO 3200 for a somewhat sterner test.