Canon EOS 450D (Digital Rebel XSi / Kiss X2 Digital) Review: Digital Photography Review

Base / Tripod Mount

	On the bottom of the 450D is a metal tripod socket which is aligned exactly with the center line of the lens and the focal plane of the sensor. Otherwise there's little to report here, this shot does give us an angle on just how narrow the hand grip is at its base.

Pop-up Flash

The EOS 450D's pop-up flash has the same specifications as the EOS 400D (and the EOS 350D before that) with a range of approximately 3.7 m (12.1 ft) at wide angle using the 18-55 mm kit lens or 2.3 m (7.5 ft) at telephoto. The camera utilizes Canon's E-TTL II flash metering system which combines subject distance information gathered from the lens with measurements taken from a brief pre-flash before the main flash to determine flash power. The built-in flash can sync up to 1/200s and has an electronic pop-up release, in Auto exposure mode the flash will raise itself when required.

AF Assist

As with previous 'Rebel series' cameras the EOS 450D uses its flash for AF assist. If you need to use AF Assist you must pop-up the flash which will fire a brief strobe of flashes (sometimes just one) to help the AF system to lock.

Flash Hot-shoe

	The EOS 450D's hot-shoe (now silver from the 400D's black) can be used with Canon and third party flashes (although sync only on most third party units). The hot-shoe is E-TTL II compatible. Compatible flashes include Speedlite 220EX, 380EX, 420EX, 430EX, 550EX, 580EX, Macro-Ring Lite, MR-14EX, Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX and Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2.

Lens Mount

The EOS 450D has a metal EF / EF-S lens mount which means that it can use the full range of Canon EF lenses as well as the designed-for-digital EF-S 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 450D shooting continuously JPEG Large/Fine for 30 seconds. The storage card used was a 4 GB SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition SD card

.JPEG continuous, 30 seconds

Canon EOS 450D JPEG continuous 30 seconds; MP3 280 KB

Supplied In the Box

Items listed below are for the Kit version (includes the EF-S 18-55 mm IS lens), note that there is no storage card include with the EOS 450D. The Body only version is exactly the same except that the lens is not included.