Introduction

Similar in size and shape to the popular Canon Rebel XSi, the T1i boosts image resolution, screen resolution and maximum ISO compared to its predecessor, and also steps up to the Digic 4 processor. The big news, though, is 1080p video in a sub-$1000 camera.

Canon gave us hands-on access to a pre-release version of the T1i. In a rare move, they even gave us permission to share some sample photos and videos with you (with the understanding that the quality may be different when the final camera ships). Overall, we found this well-designed newcomer easy to like. Here's why.

Product Tour

Overview

The Canon EOS Rebel T1i is a lightweight, compact SLR, along the same lines as the Rebel XSi and Rebel XS. It is scheduled to ship in May priced at $799.99 for the body alone, or $899.99 with an 18-55mm image-stabilized lens.

The looks are familiar, but there are new tricks under the hood.

Front

The microphone is located above and to the right of the lens.

The only substantial change here from the existing Canon XSi is the small microphone located behind the four-dot cluster to the right of the lens. There's an infrared receiver on the grip, below the shutter, and an autofocus illuminator lamp between the grip and the lens mount. To the right of the lens mount is the lens release button. As for the black tape strips on the right side, we had to cover over the camera logo before taking it outdoors, since it hadn't been announced at the time of our test drive.

Back

Again, we haven't wandered far from the XSi design, except for the small speaker located just below the playback zoom buttons on the top right. The 3-inch LCD represents a nice upgrade; same 3-inch size as before, but with a new 920,000-dot resolution. Video recording is triggered by the button marked with a red dot to the right of the LCD (during playback, the same button controls direct printing via PictBridge). Above this button is the AV/exposure compensation control, below it the playback mode button. The four-way controller includes direct access to (from the top, clockwise) white balance, atuofocus, Picture Styles and drive mode settings, with the famililar Set button set in the center. There's a well-positioned, nicely textured thumb rest at the upper right.

The LCD is a significant upgrade from the Rebel XSi.

Sides

On the right side, the button festooned with a lightning-bolt icon unleashes the pop-up flash. From this angle, we can also see the depth of field preveiw button located below the lens release button. The rubber door toward the back closes securely, protecting the familiar AV/USB jack and the spiffy new HDMI port, the better to output both your video and photos on a high-def TV.

The left side is home to the slide-back, pop-out SD card slot.

Tucked away behind the left-side door is a mini HDMI port.

Top

Movie shooting is accessible via the mode dial.

Our aerial view reveals the location of the pop-up flash and hot shoe. In addition to turning from XSi black to T1i silver, the mode dial has acquired some new functions. Holdovers include full auto (the green rectangle), shutter-priority (Tv), aperture-priority (Av), manual exposure and auto depth of field (A-DEP), which lets you specify the closest and most distant point you need to have in focus. Added to this array is Creative Auto, a feature Canon introduced with the 50D, that lets users control the shutter speed/aperture balance by deciding whether their photo should be sharper or blurrier, brighter or darker. There is a smattering of scene modes (portrait, landscape, macro, sports night portrait and no-flash), and a new movie-camera icon for video mode.

The shutter is nicely placed on a beveled platform in the front, with the single control dial behind it. The direct access button for ISO settings is on the top as well, along with the ON/OFF switch which slides forward and back next to the mode dial. The additional icons on top (the asterisk and the focus grid design) are poorly positioned labels for the shooting-mode functions of the playback zoom control buttons located on the back of the camera.

Bottom

The latched battery compartment is positioned on the left, the sturdy metal tripod socket is centered under the lens.

The metal tripod socket is properly centered.

Hardware

Viewfinder

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The viewfinder, with 95% coverage, is adequate but not terrific, especially if you wear glasses; we had trouble seeing the entire scene before us at a glance. There's a diopter adjustment dial to the left of the viewfinder and a sensor below, which turns the LCD off when you hold the camera to your eye.

LCD

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The Canon T1i LCD is a welcome improvement from the XSi on the LCD front, with a step up to the 3-inch, 920,000-dot display that's become the hallmark of an upscale SLR today. We found the screen bright and sharp, even when shooting outdoors (brightness can be adjusted in seven steps via the camera menu). Viewing angles were very good, an important feature in a camera that offers Live View shooting.

As with most inexpensive SLRs, there's no secondary monochrome LCD display to let you read and adjust camera settings from above.

As for Live View, the display kept up nicely as we moved the camera quickly to compose a shot, unlike some screens that stutter and struggle when dealing with fast action. The Live View display toggles between a clean screen, a display showing basic shooting information in white on a black strip at the bottom of the screen, a status display showing focus mode, Picture Style, white balance, drive mode and image size controls, and the same control screen with an overlaid histogram. Two optional grid overlays, one with nine squares, the other with 24, are also available.

 

Flash

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The built-in flash sits at a nice high position, far from the center of the lens, so red-eye shouldn't be an issue when shooting faces in darkened rooms. Canon gives the flash range a guide number of 13 at ISO 100. The flash sync speed is 1/200 second.

Lens Mount

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Not surprisingly, the T1i sticks with the standard EF lens mount, maintaining compatibility with the diverse and high-quality family of Canon lenses. The kit lens is not new: it's the familiar 18-55mm lens (29-88mm equivalent) image-stabilized lens offered with the Rebel XSi and XS, with a maximum aperture of f/3.5 at the widest setting and f/5.6 at full zoom. This is not our favorite Canon lens ever. In addition to being fairly slow (requiring slower shutter speeds), we've found in our previous testing that it's subject to significant distortion. It's acceptable for basic shooting, though. And if you're more persnickety about your image quality, you can always buy the camera body without the kit lens and pair it up with a more impressive piece of glass.

As always, if you want image stabilization with a Canon camera, you're going to have to buy image stabilized lenses, unlike Sony and Olympus,which build this feature right into the camera body.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

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The Canon T1i provides a mini HDMI port for connecting directly to a high-def television, a welcome addition not only for video output, but to show off your photos in their full high-res glory. There's a standard mini USB port, that now does double duty for both data connection to your computer and standard-definition video output (the XSi has a dedicated video out jack, absent here). Finally, the circular connector at the top is used for connecting a wired remote control.

Battery

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The 7.4V, 1080mAh lithium ion rechargeable battery should get 500 shots per charge, or 400 when using the flash 50% of the time.

Memory

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The Canon T1i supports high-capacity, readily available SD and SDHC memory cards. If you're planning to shoot a lot of video, it's worth investing in some high-capacity, high-speed SDHC cards. According to Canon, you should get 12 minutes of video per 4-gigabyte card when shooting in 1080p mode, and 18 minutes at 720p.

Sample Photos

 

Sample Photos

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The following sample photos were shot with a pre-production sample of the T1i, and there could be signfiicant image quality differences in the final shipping camera. Still, these shots do provide an indication of what we can expect. Clicking on any of the large photos below will call up the full-size original,. Beneath each image is a set of actual pixel-size crops.

 

 

 

 

 

Design & Layout

Design & Appearance

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No surprises to report here. It's a Canon Rebel SLR, and it looks like a Canon Rebel SLR, with the only noteworthy appearance tweak we noticed a change from a black to a silver mode dial. There is one bit of good news, though: the Rebel T1i will be sold in black only, without the ugly silver body option available for the XS and XSi.

Size & Handling

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This is a very lightweight, compact SLR, measuring 5.1 x 3.8 x 2.4 inches (128.8mm x 97.5mm x 61.9mm), precisely the same as the Canon Rebel XSi, and weighing just over a pound (16.9 oz., or 480g) without lens. Your reviewer has large hands (no, that's not them in the photo below), which caused some concern when starting to shoot with the T1i. Fortunately, the grip is deep enough, and the distance between the grip and the lens wide enough, to allow a reasonably comfortable handhold, and the positioning of the shutter button on an angled platform up front worked perfectly. For those with smaller hands, the T1i should fit particularly well, and the light weight gives it a portability edge compared to most digital SLRs.

The size and weight proved particularly helpful when shooting video. The other video-enabled Canon, the 5D Mark II, is a far more ruggedly built machine than the T1i, but there's a price to be paid when trying to hold a 3-pound-plus (with lens) device steady for video capture, or to pan it smoothly. The featherweight T1i is highly maneuverable, light enough to hold away from your body easily when shooting using Live View, and easy to snap from horizontal to vertical and back again when shooting stills.

Menu

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There are two menu systems available here. The Quick Menu turns the full-screen LCD information display into a fast-access tool for changing the settings shown. Pressing the Set button toggles between the Quick Menu and the static information display. With ready access to ISO, white balance, exposure compensation, Picture Style, image size, drive mode, self-timer and metering mode, plus the dedicated function buttons located on the back of the camera, using the traditional multi-tabbed on-screen menu system was a rarity during shooting.

When you do press the MENU button, you're greeted with the traditional, highly functional Canon menu display. There are two tabs for recording settings, two for playback, three for system settings, and My Menu (the star icon) which lets you create your own customized menu page containing your most frequently used items.

 

Ease of Use

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The T1i offers a nice balance of flexibility for sophisticated shooters and point-and-shoot auto mode for compact camera converts. The full menu system can get complex as you wander off to the custom settings area, but it's perfectly feasible to ignore that rocky terrain and learn to adjust basic camera settings using the simpler record mode menus, or the full-screen LCD settings access. As for the control buttons, the layout is easy to master and labels are legible and well placed, with two exceptions (the focus lock and focus area labels sitting on top of the camera while the buttons are on the back below).

Modes

Controls

Manual Controls

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You start out with your basic set of manual exposure options: Program mode with program shift available, shutter-priority (here dubbed Tv, for Time

Value), aperture-priority (Av) and full manual. The single control wheel makes shooting in full manual mode more cumbersome than on higher-end SLRs, which offer two wheels. Here, when shooting using manual settings, the dial changes shutter speed by default, and the shooter has to hold down the exposure compensation button while turning the dial to change the aperture setting. A ltitle too much manual dexterity required for our taste.

Canon also provides an Aperture Depth of Field mode (A-DEP), which lets the shooter set the closest and furthest points that need to be in focus, and adjust settings accordingly. It's an interesting idea, but not recommended if you're in a hurry.

Focus

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The T1i maintains the 9-point autofocus system used in the other Rebel models, along with the built-in autofocus illuminator. The autofocus system can be set to One Shot AF, Predictive AIO Servo AF (the camera attempts to follow focus a moving subject automatically) amd AI Focus AF, where the camera automatically changes between the two previous modes based on the behavior of your subject.

When shooting in Live View mode, there are three autofocus system choices. So-called Quick Focus flips the mirror down briefly (momentarily blanking out the LCD view) to use the SLR autofocus sensor, then returns to Live View mode. Alternatively, you can choose Live mode, which uses contrast detection autofocus based on the image sensor data -- a bit slower, but less disruptive. Finally there's face detection mode, which works much as it does on a point-and-shoot camera, finding faces in the frame and identifying them as the autofocus subject. Using the pre-production model of the T1i, we found Live View autofocus about as draggy as usual: we have yet to shoot with an SLR camera that can keep up with fast-moving subjects in Live View mode. Of course, we might be pleasantly surprised when we get a final production version of the T1i in our eager hands.

As expected, manual focus is also an option, and here Live View offers a useful add-on. While in manual focus mode you can magnify the on-screen display by 5x or 10x, providing a great close-up view for precise adjustments.

ISO

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ISO settings span 100-3200 in the official range, and add ISO 6400 and 12800 as extended settings.This is a step up from the Canon XSi and XSm, which top out at ISO 1600.

White Balance

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In addition to the auto white balance setting there are six white balance presets -- daylight, shade, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent and flash -- plus the option to take a custom reading.

Metering

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The Canon T1i has four metering modes: Evaluative, Partial, Spot and Center-Weighted Average. The combination of Partial and Center-Weighted Average is unusual. Basically, Partial covers about a third of the frame, while Center-Weighted Average has a smaller target area, and Spot is a smaller target still.

Shutter Speed

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Shutter speeds range from 1/4000 second to 30 seconds plus Bulb for extended exposures.

Aperture

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The aperture range will, of course, depend on the lens attached. The kit lens is an 18-55mm zoom with a maximum aperture range of f/3.5-5.6. Depth of field preview is provided.

Image Stabilization

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Unlike Olympus and Sony, Canon continues to leave image stabilization to the lens, rather than build it into the camera body. The kit lens does include image stabilization.

Picture Quality & Size Options

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The Canon T1i boosts resolution to 15.1 megapixels, compared to the 12.2-megapixel resolution of the Canon XSi. JPEGs can be shot at three sizes, each with two compression settings; the maximum image size is 4752 x 3168. The camera can also store RAW files, either alone or with an attached JPEG.

Picture Effects

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The T1i uses the Canon Picture Styles system to tailor color reproduction, sharpness, contrast and saturation to the subject at hand. There are six preset Picture Styles: Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful and Monochrome, along with three slots for users to store their own Picture Style settings.

 

Conclusion