Canon EOS 10D - Review

The Canon EOS 10D was my first DSLR and with this body I've photographed lots of birds and insects. I loved this camera very much, because it delivered great colours and delivered pictures without too much noise. Pictures shot at ISO100 were almost noise free. In terms of image quality it was miles ahead compared to its direct competitors at that time.
And compared to it's predecessor, the Canon EOS 60D, it had several advantages. First, the image quality was much better and it showed less noise its images. The autofocus was noticeable faster.


The Autofocus

The Canon EOS 10D has a 7 point autofocus sensor with a working range about 0,5-18EV.It's predecessor, the Canon D60, only had 3 AF points and its AF was mucgh slower.
Some of the cameras seemed to have a problems with significant front or back focus and had to be sent in to Canon, to adjust the autofocus. My Canon EOS 10D worked very well, but had some problems with Sigma lenses. My old Sigma 300 2,8 didn't focus correctly at all, when combined to my Canon EOS 10D. Wether Canon nor Sigma were able to solve that problem.


Image Quality

The image quality of the Canon EOS 10D was fantastic compared to its competitors and predecessor. I've photographed some of my best pictures with those camera. The colours came out great, and the details looked fantastic.

Winter Wren photographed with Canon EOS 10D an Canon EF 400mm f2,8 IS USM.

Compared to the Canon EOS D60, the images are much cleaner. Image noise is no problem up to ISO400, and ISO800 can be used in difficult light situatuions without huge problems. At ISO 100 the images are very clean (almost noise free) and as good as with recent cameras.
Colours cproduced by the Canon EOS10D are quite authentic the white balance works good in most circumstances. To get get a perfect white balance you can of course set it manually to daylight, shade, cloudy, tungsten flourescent, flash or Custom. Even a setting, where you can set it to Kelvin in 100K steps is possible. In most cases I used the cloudy or daylight setting and it worked great for me. When you photograph your images in RAW you can set the color temperature or white balance afterwards without loss of quality.
And the RAW format has lots of other advantages, too. You can get much more details out of your images, by using a RAW converter instead of using the JPEGs coming straight out of the camera. The Canon EOS10D gives you quite soft looking JPEGs, because of its noise reduction running in camera. By using a RAW converter you can control the balance between noise and detail much better.


Conclusion (2014)

The Canon EOS 10D is (or was) a fantastic camera with great image quality. Since it was launched in 2003 lots of digtal cameras with better sensors and much more functions have been developed. Of course you can buy a used Canon EOS 10D for very little money, but you perhaps will miss some of the newer features like live view, wireless flash, and many other that you will already get with recent consumer or entry level dslr now. I would recommend investing in newer models. Even recent entry level dslr will give you much more features and are much, much faster than with the Canon EOS 10D.I would recommend the Canon EOS 70D.

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