Gordon Laing from CameraLabs recently reviewed the Canon EOS 10D as part of his retro review series. I usually enjoy reading Gordon's reviews and this one was no different.
The Canon EOS 10D was a breathtaking camera that took the market by storm. It started off the xxD series of camera bodies that were hugely popular and got many (including myself) making the jump from film to digital.
DPreview back in it's early days when Phil was doing the reviews stated this about the camera;
If you've ever handled a D30 or D60 and you pick up the EOS-10D you'll be immediately struck by how much stronger this camera feels, and how much that body adds to the feeling of quality and superb value. The next surprise will be your first auto focus, which will be remarkably fast and certain. Then the shutter release, with a quoted 50 ms off the shutter release lag and a halving of the viewfinder blackout the EOS-10D feels a whole lot more responsive.
I have no concerns in stating that as things stand (at the time of writing this review) the EOS-10D is the absolute best in class, with the best image quality, lowest high sensitivity noise, superb build quality and excellent price (not to mention the huge choice of lenses).
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos10d/23
But back to Gordon's review.
You can also read his writeup here. Gordon concludes in his writeup;
After several generations of gradually evolving semi-pro DSLRs, Canon really hit its stride with the 10D. The earlier D30 and D60 may have been their first home-grown bodies, but it was the 10D in 2003 where the series number was reset and the letter D moved to the end. Canon was already satisfied by the quality from the D60’s 6 Megapixel CMOS sensor, but packed it into a tougher body, almost like a mini 1D, tweaked the controls and crucially reduced the price. DSLRs may have been steadily falling in cost over the years, but the 10D became more affordable than ever, making it the natural choice for enthusiasts.
https://www.cameralabs.com/canon-eos-10d-retro-review/
This was a landmark camera and looking at Gordon's sample photos he took it with – it still doesn't do a bad job at photography, nearly 21 years after it's release.
Be sure to check out the used sections of our favorite retailers for these older cameras, especially if you have a few EF or EF-S lenses still in a sock drawer somewhere.
If you want to relieve the past without going back to the EF mount, just pick up an EOS R100, it will allow you to relive the period of camera history where we didn't have advanced features like working touchscreens ;)
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TBH at that time I wasn't aware of the changes that took place in the DSLR camera market.
I remember getting into contact with the 20D from a friend of mine as a first DSLR.
I am not sure if that one (20D) or the 70D for its better AF system (no longer that 9 digit :sick:) was my xxD favorite.
Personally, I think i took close to 300k images on the 20D. It was certainly my favorite camera of all time.
it was a surprisingly well built little camera! I had two of them. one for color and another for IR. that 18MP sensor for IR was one of my favorites the APS-C sensors since then the APS-C sensors seem to be more muted in the response.
No, I do not fondly remember the 10D!
Update: The film scanner files were 12.4MP. My neighborhood WalMart is about 2 miles from RIT. They did a significant business in color negative film processing without the printing. I wanted my negatives cut into strips of 4 images. The RIT people wanted the rolls uncut. They probably had better film scanners than I did.
I got it just prior to my sister's wedding. The back cover door on my Elan had broken and wouldn't stay closed. I had dabbled in digital with a small point and shoot, and had read great things about the 10D. Having had a few EF lenses already, I thought that the 10D would be a great move for me. If I could find one.
Well, as luck would have it, about 2 weeks before the wedding, Adorama showed them in stock so I grabbed one along with a 50 mm f/1.4 lens (which I also still have). The camera and lens arrived in time, I photographed the wedding, and I've basically never shot film again.
Looking back, it was a great step forward, but today's sensor tech and all the other features and capabilities really have jumped way ahead of that 10D. Still, it was a game changer in its time, and is still a competent camera today.
Something I got a couple of years down the road, again before the EF-S lenses, was the very good Canon 17-40L. A nice stop-gap measure on Canon's part, and an excellent "normal zoom" on the crop sensors. It was a little heavier, being a full frame lens, but optically, I preferred it to most EF-S offerings, and since I also obtained the original 5D, I tried to keep my lenses compatible with both full frame and the crop sensor.
- 6mp seems like a lot of pixels to me now
- amazing, how tech has developed
- somebody really, really hates the R100 :ROFLMAO:
- if the 10d really is like the r100 I fine with never having touched it :)
But I can relate to how great the camera must have felt because I thought my 1000d and 1300d were great and the 750d was absolutely amazing to me at some point :)
I purchased it in March 2004, as my 500N had been stolen in a burglary together with a telelens (100-300?) that was mounted on it at the time. The burglars weren't the sharpest tools in the shed, as they also took my Nokia 1311 brick of a cellphone.
I was considering to get another film camera, but was convinced by my step-mom to switch to digital. The magazine she worked for had switched wholesale to 1Ds about 1-1.5 years before.
I got 10D when the 20D was announced. The 20D was too expensive for me, sadly.
I got the 17-40L as well, and it served me well on APS-C bodies. Not so much on FF.
As others have mentioned it didn't like low light (ISO400 was kinda the limit, if I remember correctly) and the write speed to the CF card was abysmal. It could write ~3 jpeg images/second, but if you shot RAW, it was a single image/second.
In good light the images had great colour and gave me some highly cherished images - unlike the 50D I purchased 4.5 years later. I hated that camera due to its chroma noise and it seemed like the AF wasn't as accurate as the 10D. I waited in vain for a 7D2 but caved in to a 5D3 in '12 and never looked back at APS-C again.
About that time Hasselblad and Imacon started marketing a 22mp MFD system, and my dream of eliminating film was realized, while I continued to invest in a succession of canon bodies as a second, faster system.
Today I use canon largely for video (c500mk II) and have consolidated to the GFX 100 for stills. But it was the 10d that hooked me on canon for more than 2 decades, even if the 10d itself wasn’t quite up to my standards.