Recent mirrorless cameras and consumer expectation for better quality autofocus, especially in video, placed new demands on SLR manufacturers, which may explain Canon's production of a smaller-bodied Rebel with a new Hybrid AF system. It's a handsome and well-designed little camera, so I was happy to get to use it on a daily basis. As an owner of several Canon SLR bodes and lenses, it was easy to give the SL1 a thorough test over a few weeks. My relatively large and varied family also offered many opportunities to use the SL1 like most of its target buyers will. It accompanied us to the beach, to several restaurants, and snapped quite a few shots at events around town.
I was more often pleasantly surprised by the Canon SL1's performance than disappointed. Its quick, quiet shutter has a higher-quality sound than my older Rebels, drawing less attention since it lacks the winding noise that was finally eliminated in the T4i. Canon's Hybrid AF also did better than expected, for both Live View shooting and video. Since the SL1 is pretty clearly aimed at consumer users, we'll go over a few scenarios and show samples that demonstrate a few of the SL1's features that helped a parent in his day-to-day photography.
Easily the biggest consumer complaint over the years has been that cameras don't focus or capture pictures well enough in low light, including simple indoor scenes where our eyes work just fine, so I spent more time exploring how well the SL1 handles these more difficult scenarios in both Live View and phase-detect modes. Canon also emphasized the Scene modes that address many low-light issues, so I tried them as well.
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| F7.1, 1/250, ISO 1600, Kit lens @ 50mm | 100% crop |
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| Inside a yogurt shop, I was careful to grab a table by the window to take advantage of the nice light. Manually selecting ISO 1600 was a good choice, as it delivered enough detail and let me set a fast shutter speed and medium aperture. The kit lens set to F7.1 gave enough depth of field to capture both faces in focus at 50mm, while rendering the background soft enough to set it off reasonably well. Focus for this shot was set in Live View, by the way, using the new Hybrid Autofocus. | |
Like most SLRs these days, the Canon Rebel SL1 has an Auto ISO setting, which is great for family photography, since lighting conditions can change quickly enough; and when you're with a busy family it's easy to forget to change it back from a high setting to a low, and vis-versa. So when going out, I put most of my cameras into Auto ISO, changing it if I need to. The Canon SL1 allows you to set a limit as to how high you want it to go, from as low as 400 up to 6400. To use ISO 12,800 or higher, you have to select them manually.
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| 1/60 sec, F5.0, ISO 4000, 38mm - While photographing marshmallow roasting near dusk, the SL1 set the ISO to 4000 for a hand-holdable shutter speed. Edges are a little rough, but the resulting image is still clean enough for a quality print. | 100% crop |
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| 1/13 sec, F5.6, ISO 12,800, 55mm - Taken at night in the light of my fluorescent desk light, this shot looks pretty good. I had to set ISO 12,800 manually, as the ISO 6400 shots showed more motion blur. Judging from the sharpness of the shot below, there may have still been some motion blur affecting this shot, or else autofocus was incorrect. | 100% crop |
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| 1/100 sec, F5.0, ISO 25,600, 53mm w/18-55mm lens - The Canon SL1's self-timer mode can be set to take up to 10 shots when the timer goes off, great for making a better quality selfie than most cell phones can manage. I tried shooting it handheld, but mounting it to a tripod allowed my subject to relax. There's definitely color noise and lost detail in the shadows, expected at this setting, but the overall image is quite good. The eyelashes crop below shows the effects of noise suppression. | Raw image converted with ACR's default settings - There's less chroma noise in the shadows, though more luminance noise. A closer look also reveals more detail in high-contrast areas, like the eyelashes. |
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| 100% crop | 100% crop |
My son bought a candle on the day I’d considered trying candlelight mode, so it was meant to be. Candlelight mode tries to maintain a more yellow color, rather than make it white, and you can adjust the amount of yellow the camera maintains with a simple onscreen slider, shifting it toward blue or yellow.
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JPEG 1/15 sec, F5.6, ISO 6400, Kit lens @ 55mm |
RAW via ACR with WB set to 2200K |
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| 100% crop | 100% crop |
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The shot above was among the cleaner, despite the ISO 6400 setting. Roll over the tabs above to see an ACR conversion with the white balance set to 2200K, eliminating the yellow cast; default sharpening was applied to the Raw file.
Interestingly, I reshot these images in Program mode with white balance set to Auto and the camera defaulted to a very yellow scene anyway, looking essentially the same as the default settings in Candlelight mode. Given our experience, you might not find Candlelight mode of much use.
Two other modes are worth trying: Night portrait and Handheld night scene, both of which can help your camera capture what your eye sees. Night portrait combines a flash exposure with a slower shutter speed to capture the ambient light. Though it required a tripod, Night portrait produced a nice shot, with the unusual side-effect that in this case it looks like my subject is standing in front of a green screen or backdrop rather than a real scene. Despite the flash pulsing to help with autofocus, my subject also got red-eye.
Since I don't normally carry a tripod, I'd probably get more use from Handheld night scene, which essentially eliminates the need for a tripod by combining several hand-holdable exposures into one lower-noise image.
| Night portrait | |
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| 1 sec, F5.6, ISO 800, 55mm - In most cases you'll need a tripod for Night portrait mode, because the camera uses a flash to illuminate your near subject, then leaves the shutter open to capture the background. Unfortunately the flash produced red-eye. Nearby ambient illumination can create ghost images if your subject moves even a little, so I moved her away from a lamp to get this crisper shot. | 100% crop |
| Handheld night scene | |
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| 1/13 sec, F5.6, ISO 12,800, 34mm - The camera takes four shots and aligns them in the camera to reduce noise. Any subject that moves doesn't benefit from the noise reduction, and appears as surrounded by more noise. While I took these shots, the third person in the crop below moved and the others stayed still. The people on the right of the dock were also walking toward the others, and they're preceded by noise, which is preferable to ghost images. | 100% crop |
The Canon SL1's flash can't be used to remote-control external flashes, so I didn't get to use my strobes remotely. Again, most folks will only use the pop-up flash on this camera, so I stuck with that, using it primarily as fill in sunlit situations, preferring higher ISO settings and no flash for indoor images.
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| 1/200, F5, ISO 100, Fill flash, 44mm w/15-85mm lens | Increased contrast |
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| With a little help from Auto Lighting Optimizer, the Canon SL1's flash did well against this sunset. This JPEG had just enough foreground exposure to allow for a quick contrast adjustment in Photoshop to make up for the lower contrast and lens flare that comes from shooting into the Sun. (Always be careful to save JPEGs either as TIFFs or no-compression JPEGs under a different name when making modifications like this.) | |
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| 1/200, F5.6, ISO 100, 63mm w/15-85mm lens - Fill flash opened up these shadows just right when I dialed it back by 2/3 stop. | 1/160, F5.6, ISO 320, 22mm w/15-85mm lens - Another case where the pop-up was essential for filling in afternoon shadows in this image cropped from a vertical. |
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Few lenses can focus all wavelengths of light at the same spot across the lens area, because optics refract light of different frequencies at different angles, just like a prism. As such, it's not uncommon to find colored fringes around objects at the edges of a lens, as you can see in the first crop below.
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| 1/400, F3.5, ISO 100, 18mm w/18-55mm kit lens - Taken from the upper right corner, the purple fringes on the edge of the leaves are clear chromatic aberration. | 100% crop |
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| 1/400, F3.5, ISO 100, 18mm w/18-55mm kit lens - With Chromatic aberration correction turned on the purple fringes are gone. | 100% crop |
Canon's Chromatic aberration correction pretty well eliminates all traces of C.A. in this case, using the 18-55mm kit lens at 18mm.
Note that we tested the SL1's resolution, dynamic range, and noise characteristics and found them to be the same as the recently tested Canon T5i/700D, so feel free to see those pages in the T5i review for noise, dynamic range, and resolution.
Overall, for stills the Canon Rebel SL1 performed very well, even in low light. Live View autofocus was much better than other cameras I've used in the past, as was promised when Canon announced the camera. For more on that, see the Live view and movie shooting page.
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 18.0 MP CMOS Digital Camera with 3-inch Touchscreen and Full HD Movie Mode (Body Only) | $599.00 |
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 18.0 MP CMOS Digital SLR with 18-55mm EF-S IS STM Lens | Too low to display |
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 18.0 MP CMOS Digital Camera with 3-inch Touchscreen and Full HD Movie Mode (Body Only) | $599.00 |
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 18.0 MP CMOS Digital SLR with 18-55mm EF-S IS STM Lens + Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS II Telephoto Zoom Lens | Too low to display |
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 Digital SLR Camera & EF-S 18-55mm IS STM Lens with EF-S 55-250mm IS Lens + 32GB Card + Battery + Case + Filter + Tripod Kit | $849.95 |
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 18.0 MP CMOS Digital SLR with 18-55mm EF-S IS STM Lens + Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III Telephoto Zoom Lens | $799.00 |
Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS II Telephoto Zoom Lens (Import) for Canon EOS 7D, 60D, 70D, Rebel SL1, T1i, T2i, T3, T3i, T4i, T5i, XS, XSi, XT, & XTi Digital SLR Cameras + 6pc Bundle Accessory Kit | $177.77 |
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 Digital SLR Camera & EF-S 18-55mm IS STM Lens with EF-S 55-250mm IS Lens + 32GB Card + Battery + Case + Flash + Tele/Wide Lenses Kit | $849.95 |
Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS II Telephoto Zoom Lens (Import) for Canon EOS 7D, 60D, EOS Rebel SL1, T1i, T2i, T3, T3i, T4i, T5i, XS, XSi, XT, & XTi Digital SLR Cameras + 10pc Bundle Deluxe Accessory Kit | $186.00 |
Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Telephoto Zoom Lens for Canon EOS 1D, 1DS, 1DX, 5D Mark II/III, 6D, 7D, 40D, 60D, EOS Rebel SL1, T1i, T2i, T3, T3i, T4i, T5i, XS, XSi, XT, & XTi Digital SLR Cameras + 6pc Bundle Accessory Kit | $429.95 |
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 Digital SLR Camera & EF-S 18-55mm IS STM Lens with EF 75-300mm III Lens + 64GB Card + Battery + Backpack + 2 Lenses + Accessory Kit | $799.95 |
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