Tripod Mount

	On the bottom of the camera you'll find a metal tripod socket which is aligned exactly with the center line of the lens. As I've requested in previous reviews it would have been nice to have had a rubber 'foot' on the base of the camera, although I will speculate that this could cause the camera to be incompatible with the optional battery grip.

Internal flash

The EOS 30D features an E-TTL II pop-up flash (same as the EOS 20D), it has a guide number of 13 (approx. 3.3 m @ 17 mm / 2.3 m @ 85 mm; ISO 100) and a wide angle coverage of 17 mm. Support for E-TTL II means that lens distance information is now used to calculate the required flash power. Flash sync speed is 1/250 sec.

The EOS 30D also allows for FE-Lock (Flash Exposure Lock) which can be used to take a meter reading of the subject using the flash before taking the shot. This can be useful for recomposing the scene, with the flash up (or an EX flash attached) simply aim the center of the frame at the subject to be metered, press the * button and the camera will fire the flash and take a meter reading, the next shot you take will use this locked exposure.

AF Assist

Sadly Canon are sticking with the use of the internal flash for AF assist. So instead of having a separate lamp to provide assistance to the AF system in low light you have to raise the flash unit which will strobe to provide illumination for AF.

External flash

	The EOS 30D's hot-shoe can be used with Canon and third party flash units (sync only). As with the internal flash the hot shoe supports E-TTL II metering which uses distance information from the lens to calculate flash power. This works with all Canon lenses (although distance information is only provided by lenses with ring type USM motors).

Lens Mount

	The EOS 30D has a standard metal EF / EF-S lens mount which means that it supports all Canon EF and EF-S lenses plus some older as manual focus and compatible third party lenses. Because the sensor is smaller than a 35 mm frame all lenses are subject to a field of view crop (sometimes called focal length multiplier) of 1.6x, thus a 17 mm lens provides the same field of view of a 27.2 mm.

Shutter Release Sound

In some of our digital SLR reviews we now provide a sound recording of a continuous burst of shots. Below you can see waveforms of a recording made of the EOS 30D shooting continuously for 30 seconds in JPEG (Standard and Fine) and RAW. The storage card used was a SanDisk Extreme III 1 GB Compact Flash (Type I).

JPEG continuous, 30 seconds

Canon EOS 30D JPEG Standard - 131 frames (4.85 fps initial burst of 117 frames)
Canon EOS 30D JPEG Fine - 78 frames (4.85 fps initial burst of 41 frames)

Canon EOS 30D JPEG continuous (Standard then Fine); MP3 1,342 KB

RAW continuous, 30 seconds

Canon EOS 30D RAW - 32 frames (4.85 fps initial burst of 11 frames)

Canon EOS 30D RAW continuous; MP3 445 KB

Supplied In the Box

The EOS 30D will be offered as body only or as a kit with the EF-S 17 -85 mm or 18 - 55 mm lens (as shown in the image on the right below).

The EOS 30D body only is supplied as:

• Canon EOS 30D Digital SLR body
• Eyecup Eb
• BP-511A Lithium-Ion battery pack
• CB-5L Battery charger
• Neck strap
• USB Cable
• Video Cable
• CD-ROMs
  • Canon EOS Solution Disk 12
  • EOS Utility
  • ZoomBrowser EX
  • Remote Capture
  • Digital Photo Professional 2.1
• Manuals / Reg. card