Canon EOS 1000D (EOS Digital Rebel XS) review

This camera was a major disappointment. I shot with film for many years (an old manual Minolta) and I have also used a Canon compact digital camera. I was very happy with the compact camera and therefore decided to stick with Canon. Features all work, more or less, the main problem is image quality which is why I have to slam this camera. Dull, flat, bland images are the big problem although I am not very impressed with the sharpness either. I don't know, but since this model gets good reviews for image quality, maybe my camera is a lemon and faulty in some way.

On a different topic altogether, although I knew what to expect when I bought this camera, I am still surprised that the cumbersome SLR mechanism is still the industry norm for almost all quality digital cameras. In all other respects, digital cameras are amazing technological wonders, but for the foreseeable future, they will remain noisy and larger than necessary because of this throwback technology.

Problems:

- Colors are flat and photos dull especially with landscape photos. Although color saturation and contrast can be boosted in the picture style menu, the result looks very artificial. More can be done with RAW files but, for the most part, I expect a camera to be able to produce decent smaller-sized JPEG files without much post-processing.
- Images are not particularly sharp. Just so-so.
- Live view is cumbersome. Especially the focus.
- The auto focus does not work well in low light.
- Strange, but auto ISO never selects 100 ASA
- Self-timer delay is restricted to 2 or 10 seconds. No custom time delay.
- Although I never took off the kit lens, I have now have a huge speck of dust on the sensor which is not removed by the auto sensor cleaning.