The Digital Video Camera Guy

Facts About the CANON EOS Rebel XSi

The CANON EOS Rebel XSi offers two different body designs. An attractive solid black and a less-attractive two-tone silver and black model. Both models comes in a body only or single lens kit with the EF-S 18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens. The XSI is slightly larger than the XTI, the XSI takes off a couple of ounces, making it 1 pound and 2.5 ounces. The plastic body gives it a feel and appearance of a cheaper brand camera. The grip is not entirely desirable either. The larger 3 inch LCD screen provides some necessary changes to layout control over the XTI model. Almost all the buttons are easily accessible with your fingers, making it ideal for easy picture taking. There is no two-hand operation needed with this camera. With one hand you can fully navigate between changing ISO, white balance, metering and so on. The menu makes navigation very easy.

Regardless of the XSI’s pros and cons, it still delivers the best in it’s class photo quality, which is quite a surprise, given the high-resolution sensor. One nuisance is the tendency to underexpose photos. You might just need to kick the sharpness settings up a notch to deliver better quality photos. The color accuracy, dynamic range and consistently good noise reduction profile clearly puts this model in front of similar class cameras. This camera also features internal and external flash and the lenses render extremely good edge-to-edge sharpness when taking pictures.

The CANON EOS Rebel XSi will deliver slightly better performance and picture quality than it’s competitors, making it a worthwhile consideration. In tests, the XSI just edges past its competition for shooting speeds. It powers to photo in no more than 0.2 seconds. The XSI’s JPEG shooting lag is a tad bit longer than it’s competitors. The norm is 1.2 seconds between takes in dim conditions. Shot-to-shot time takes about 0.4 seconds for a raw JPEG and adding flash recycling time bumps this time up to only 0.7 seconds.

Let’s take a look at some of it’s advantages at a glance: Excellent photo quality for it’s class and price and a better-than-average shooting speed.

Now let’s take a look at some of it’s disadvantages: First off, the maximum ISO is 1600 and the camera has a huge spot-for-spot metering response.

Overall, this camera does not stand out for it’s feature set or design, but the CANON EOS Rebel XSi does deliver on performance and excelled photo quality. Overall, this camera gets 8 our of 10 stars. The price of this camera ranges from $625-$899. Find out how to buy the Canon Eos Rebel XSi cheapest.