This review is aimed at my fellow amateurs, first time DSLR buyers who want to take their new cameras out shooting pictures of bugs, their kids, and their vacations. I like my Canon EOS 50D very, very much. I’ve owned it for three months, I’ve traveled several thousand miles with it, and I’ve shot over 2,000 pictures in conditions ranging from swampy humidity to dry cold to light rain and fog. I’ve tried it out in low-light interiors without flash, I’ve used zoom and macro lenses to shoot birds, insects, flowers, landscapes, and my children at play, and I’ve been very pleased with its performance and durability across the board.

The 50D menus are easy to navigate. They’re simply and logically laid out. They don’t make the instruction manual unnecessary (far from it), but they make it very easy for me to find menu items without looking them up. The three-inch, high-resolution LCD panel is stunning. It makes reading the menu items easy on my aging eyes, even in bright sunlight, and it allows me to see clearly the images I’ve shot. The zoom feature for image playback is very easy to use, and when the image is blown up to maximum size on the screen, the multi-controller button makes navigating around it easy as well. “Easy” is the word I keep using here, and it applies to just about every feature of this camera.

I like the placement of the various buttons and controls. My wife does not. I’m tall with long and slender fingers; my wife is not tall and her hands are not large. For me this camera just feels right, and my fingers move naturally to the controls. My wife says the camera feels too bulky and she thinks the controls are awkwardly placed. She hasn’t actually gone out to to take pictures with it and has only held it to see what it’s like, but I think it’s a safe bet that she wouldn’t choose the 50D as her camera.

The battery life is good. On my last trip I was able to shoot around 600 pictures before I had to install the second battery. I didn’t use the LCD monitor to compose my shots, I didn’t make much use of the flash, and I made sparing use of the lens-stabilization feature, but I did spend a few minutes each night looking at the day’s pictures on the LCD monitor as I decided which ones to get rid of. I’ve spent the last week trying to take pictures of hummingbirds in my backyard with the zoom lens fully extended, so I’ve been using stabilization with every shot and it eats up battery fast. The camera powers down when I don’t use it for a minute, but it comes back on the instant I hit the shutter button. I tend not to turn it off with the on/off switch when I’m carrying it around, just to let it power down on its own. The one problem I sometimes run into is that it’s easy to hit the playback button by accident (it bumps against my hip at just the right (or wrong) angle when the camera is hanging from my shoulder), and when that happens the display comes on and stays on until I turn it off. I’ve been out walking and several times looked down to see that big, bright LCD panel showing the last picture I shot, eating up power as if I had a pocket full of batteries. I could just turn the camera off between shots (when I turn it on it’s ready to take pictures by the time I get the viewfinder up to my eye) but for some reason I prefer to grumble and turn the screen back off.

I haven’t commented on the pictures this camera takes. Those depend crucially on the lens you use. I bought a Tamron 18-270mm zoom lens, and I’ve borrowed a friend’s 60mm Canon macro lens and a lower end telephoto. The 15 megapixel sensor will show every weakness of your lens. My Tamron does a very nice job, but that telephoto was bad. The macro has been adequate, but I’m going to save my pennies to buy the very best I can when I get my own. I wouldn’t settle for one of the standard kit lenses that are often sold with DSLRs. They can take nice pictures with a smaller sensor, but with the larger sensor in this camera they’re a non-starter. I wouldn’t buy this camera without setting aside about the same amount of money to buy a lens for it. My only other comment on picture-quality has to do with the ISO. I’ve had no problem at all taking indoor shots without flash. At ISO 1600 the pictures are nice and clear. At 3200 they’re a little grainy, but not bad. I haven’t tried the expansion to 6400 or 12,800, and I’m sure the images they produce are probably pretty grainy, but it’s nice to know that I can go there if I have to. If I’m taking a picture of my daughter during her dance recital from the back of a badly lit auditorium, a bit of noise is okay if I still get the shot.

I had one problem with this camera that I could and should have avoided. I bought a Canon because I already had a very good lens on my Canon EOS Elan II, a film camera that I loved but hadn’t used much in the last seven years since my wife game me a digital point-and-shoot for my birthday. I decided I wanted to start taking photography more seriously and wanted a DSLR camera, after considerable research I decided that the Canon and Nikon products were very closely comparable, and I decided to be fiscally responsible by going with a Canon so that I wouldn’t have to buy a new lens right away. Imagine my distress when I discovered that my Sigma lens wouldn’t work properly on my new camera – no autofocus and a frozen aperture. The problem, I’m told, is that Sigma doesn’t pay a licensing fee to Canon, so there are issues with compatibility as Canon updates its line. I don’t blame Canon for this, but had I known about the compatibility problem, it might have changed my cost/benefit calculation in favor of Nikon. Probably not, but the lesson is that one shouldn’t just check to see that lenses are forward compatible, but that a particular manufacturer’s lenses are forward compatible. I stopped investigating when I learned that EF-mount lenses were compatible with an EFS-mount camera, and that was a mistake.

There’s a lot more I could write about this camera, but that’s probably better covered by more technically knowledgeable reviewers. The bottom line is that I am very pleased with my EOS 50D. I’m having a great time learning to use it and I’m finding that it offers more than I can actually take full advantage of (it gives me a great deal of room to grow). It’s ruggedly built, easy to use, nice to handle. And my wife just informed me that if I’m very good, Santa just might bring me that macro lens I’m wanting. It’s time for me to stop writing and go wash dishes.