The 10D body alone cost $1,500 when it came out, but can now be had for under $300. It’s rated for 100,000 shutter cycles, so even a second hand one should have some good life left in it.

The camera has a 6.3 megapixel sensor, and the sensor is not a full frame sensor, so it causes an effective 1.6x magnification for any lens you attach to it. Thus, it gives a view as if you were using a 160 mm lens if you attach a 100 mm lens to it. Great for telephotos, not so great for wide angles.

The sensor is not coated with anti-dust technology, and there is no way to clean it except to tell the camera to open the shutter for a sensor cleaning and swab it yourself. Sensor cleaning isn’t difficult, but it is annoying to have to do if you switch lenses a lot.

The camera can save images as .CRW files (Canon RAW), as .JPG files in high or low compression, and at three different image sizes. The largest image size is approximately 2,000 x 3,000 pixels. It can also save in both RAW and JPG at the same time. I always use Fine qualiy JPG only, because the RAW files are a lot of work, and short of doing large format printing fine art work, the difference is virtually undetectable. You also eat CF card space a lot faster with RAW files, and it takes a long time to save them.

The camera has the standard automatic and manual modes - portrait, landscape, macro, sports, plus aperture priority, shutter priority, full manual mode and a special mode for specifying the desired depth of field.

The LCD is about 1″ x 1.5″ and that’s too small. It’s hard to judge whether you got proper exposure unless you know how to read a histogram, and results can appear to be as much as 1 full stop different than they actually are. A nice feature when viewing the histogram is that blown out pixels blink. Usually, if you go 1/3rd stop below the exposure where they stop blinking, you’ll be perfect exposure.

There’s a shutter speed of 1/4000th of a second at the high end and 30 seconds at the low end, with the Bulb option allowing for a cable release. (The cable release is electronic, and costs around $80, when I bought one.)

The 10D has a titanium body, and it feels good and solid in the hand. It has in camera adjustments for brightness, color, sharpness and contrast. I usually let the camera handle those things and save the results as a JPG, because even as pick as I am, I have never really been able to make much difference of the results when I went through the efforts with RAW. The camera does an excellent job with these things.

It has a host of custom functions, including second curtain sync, which allows for the flash to be fired right before the shutter closes, thus allowing for phantom motion with the subject in sharp view at the end of the motion blur.

The onboard flash is small, too close to the body and with a guide number of 12, typically weak. It produces awful direct flash results, and a hot shoe flash is highly recommended. I have both the 580-EX and the 580-EXII, and both work very well with this camera, even though it doesn’t have some of the more advanced features of the newer camera bodies, which these flashes can support.

ISO range extends from 100 to 3200 with an ISO boost, or 1600 without. Noise becomes noticeable around ISO 400 on this camera, and if you shoot stock, as I do, you’ll want to stick to ISO 100 or 200.

This camera has paid for itself at least twice over, and produces very nuce images if you take the time to learn how to make it do what you want instead of using auto mode. It can’t hold a candle to the latest and greatest, but as a cheap and reliable backup for the more advanced cameras, it’s a great (and cheap) option.

It uses a BP-511 or BP-512 battery pack, which is really two AA batteries in a strangely shaped plastic shell. The charger that comes with the camera charges the battery in about 45 minutes. You can expect one of these battery packs to last 2 years under moderate to heavy use before it needs to be replaced.

This is still my workhorse camera, mainly because I know it so well that I see no reason to spend more money on a new one, although a 5D Mark II would be a perfect upgrade. This camera is recommended as a secondary or backup for a professional photographer, or as an inexpensive quality camera for the student or enthusiast on a budget.

Rating: 7