The New Canon 30D

· Comment
Canon 30D

As I was doing my late-night news roundup, I stum­bled upon some inter­est­ing new Web 2.0 apps. The top two that are on my list to beta-test are Fold­era and Fly­spy. I can’t wait to see how Fold­era works, it seems that it’ll be use­ful at work and at home. As for Fly­spy, this thing should make it eas­i­er for those of us “remote­ly” work­ing from home. I hope it saves me a ton of cash so I may have some left for some oth­er good­ies lat­er this year. Not to men­tion, a cou­ple of expens­es dur­ing my big trips (Hawaii, Japan and P.I.).

Any­ways, a lit­tle birdie that a new toy has just been unveiled, Canon’s 30D. It seems that it is using the same sen­sor as the 20D. But a cou­ple of more intrigu­ing changes can be high­light­ed as stat­ed by Rob Gail­braith:

a 2.5‑inch (diag­o­nal) rear LCD, increased burst depth, Pic­ture Styles, a shut­ter with a high­er duty cycle rat­ing and a long list of oth­er cam­era usabil­i­ty changes.

A cou­ple of things that I did like with the new 30D fea­tures are:

  • Canon’s more flex­i­ble Pic­ture Style menu, which replaces the Para­me­ters menu of the 20D
  • ISO 100‑1600 is now selec­table in 1/3 stop incre­ments
  • Increased burst depth: 11 frames for RAW CR2 shoot­ing, 30 for Large Fine JPEG and 9 for RAW+JPEG
  • Switch­able High-Speed Con­tin­u­ous (5 fps) and Low-Speed Con­tin­u­ous (3 fps) frame rate set­tings are now includ­ed
  • An Auto set­ting in the Long Expo­sure Noise Reduc­tion Cus­tom Func­tion
  • The abil­i­ty, like sev­er­al more-pricey Canon dig­i­tal SLRs, to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly apply long expo­sure noise pro­cess­ing to one pic­ture while cap­tur­ing anoth­er
  • The addi­tion of a 3.5% spot meter­ing mode
  • A more-pre­cise 4‑increment bat­tery charge indi­ca­tor
  • No more new fold­ers cre­at­ed every 100 pho­tos; in the 30D, a fold­er can hold 9999 pho­tos (this one is a 50/50 like/dislike to me)
  • Dur­ing play­back, the image+shooting data screen will dis­play either an RGB or Bright­ness his­togram, file size and will option­al­ly dis­play AF mark­ings
  • The Jump fea­ture dur­ing image play­back can now leap back and forth 10 pic­tures at a time, 100 pic­tures at a time or by the date shot

So yah, “noth­in’ seri­ous.” It looks like it’ll be ship­ping mid-March (US) with an MSRP of $1399. $1399? That was how much I got my 20D for back in Decem­ber through Costco.com. Oh well, you can’t beat a rebate of $300 for it. Any­ways, I might have to take Cost­co up on their 100% return/warranty pol­i­cy lat­er this year. Good times.

Comments are currently closed.