I have always carried a small point and shoot camera in the bag I shuttle to and from work, but never really liked the results it produced. It may be just me but I like a view finder and hate using an LCD to compose images. So when Canon release the new Rebel SL1 I thought this might be the solution I've been looking for. It is small, very light weight and accepts all of my current lenses, although it looks a little strange mounted on my 70-200mm.
My 1st real outing with it was the Serena Rider concert at this year's Luminato Festival and I was impressed with the results. There was only the stage light, flash wasn't an option so the ISO had to be cranked up to 3200 at times and I was surprised how well the images looked. Noise was impressively low considering the ISO and holding the camera was a dream. It is big enough that you could hold it (unlike most point and shoots) but light enough that you hardly knew it was there.
I was a little skeptical of the Rebel's button layout and had never used an LCD touch screen to control a camera, but I was soon sold on this feature. I really liked being able to switch settings with the LCD, without my glasses I could easily make changes and being dark the LCD helped there too. I hope this feature is added to the 7D II which is supposed to be released soon, in fact I hope the 7D II also handles noise as well as this little SLR.
The only draw back I found and I knew this going in was the RAW frame rate, I was bumping into the buffer more than I'd like but I didn't buy this camera for wild life per se so I can live with it. Overall a good little camera.
I've Been Working on Something
3 months ago