Canon EOS 600D Digital SLR camera

Digital SLR camera

By Zara Baxter, Auckland | Wednesday, 18 May 2011
The nicest thing about the Canon EOS 600D is that it improves on the already excellent 550D, which we reviewed last issue, and which gained our coveted Platinum award and Editors’ Choice.

It’s very similar in looks to the 550D, but adds an articulated screen and a slightly heavier (50g additional weight) build with a little more height, width and depth. Both have the same screen – 3-inch, 1,040,000-dot LCD – but the 600D’s is articulated, allowing greater flexibility in composing shots with live view.

The controls, too, are similar. The 600D has additional handgrips and slightly smaller, repositioned controls necessitated by the screen attachment bumping everything to the left-hand side at the rear. The 550D offered automatic switching between live view and viewfinder, but the 600D uses a button to do the same task.

As with the 550D, the 600D is designed for the enthusiastic amateur photographer wanting to move up from a compact, but also seeking the features they’ve come to expect from high-end compacts. To supply those needs, it features a stack of pre-configured modes – Creative Auto, Scene-Intelligent Auto and Scenes. These combine with a very helpful walkthrough guide to features and settings within the OSD to make learning the camera as straightforward as possible for those graduating from compact to DSLR.

You can opt, for example, to use friendly plain English (called Basic+) descriptions to adjust depth of field (make the background sharper vs make the background fuzzier) while using the automatic modes.

For the more advanced user, the program, manual and shutter/aperture modes use the Q menu, which should be familiar to anyone who has used the 550D or 7D. You access the setting you’d like to adjust using the four way control and modify it using the adjustment wheel just above the shutter button.

In short, everything is, if not instantly navigable to those unfamiliar with Canon’s recent layouts and settings, at least readily learnable.

New to the 600D is the ability to add creative filters during playback, which is handy to test out effects. There’s a ‘miniature’ filter and a fisheye filter, for example. You can also rate your photographs. Additionally, you can now preview different aspect ratios in liveview.

We took a range of shots using the 18-135mm kit lens supplied (you can also get a kit with an 18-55mm lens), and the image quality was in general excellent. There’s impressive precision and focus, which is due in part to the 600D using the same 18MP APS-C sensor that the 550D and 7D use. Noise starts to become an issue around the ISO 800-1600 mark, with noise noticeable on ISO 1600 ISO at full magnification. The 600D goes to ISO 6400 (12800 extended).

The dynamic contrast sometimes has issues with highlights, and the Canon Digic4 engine seems to auto-sharpen images during JPG conversion, though the chance that you’ll notice it is very slim.

The only other thing worthy of note was that we found the auto mode tends towards overexposure during sunset and dawn shots rather than accuracy of colour reproduction, but in general the colour reproduction was excellent.

The video, as with the 550D, features 1080p at frame rates of 24, 25 or 30fps, and you can use a snapshot mode to capture short bursts of footage that can be edited together.

While the 550D is still available, the 600D offers several improvements that justify the additional $200 in cost for the single-lens kit with 18-55mm MkII lens.

If you’re after a complete package camera that’s the perfect upgrade from a compact at an affordable price, and can afford the 600D, you’ll get a camera that will grow with your skills.

The 600D is distibuted by Renaissance, Ingram Micro and Dove Electronics.