Shooting
Shooting with the D30 is very satisfying. The camera is quick and responsive and offers a full assortment of shooting features. Users familiar with other EOS cameras will feel right at home with the D30’s controls. When shooting in Program mode, for example, the top-mounted control wheel lets you cycle through reciprocal exposure settings, while the back wheel provides exposure compensation. Pretty much all of the control you’ll need for most situations is provided by these two simple dials.
The camera’s viewfinder provides a full status display including shutter speed, aperture, focusing zone, and exposure compensation. In addition, a flash icon appears when the camera’s flash is popped up. The only shortcoming of the D30’s viewfinder is its lack of any kind of split-field focusing aid. If you choose to focus manually, you’re on your own.
Most of the time you’ll probably be using autofocus (assuming you’re using an autofocus lens), so the D30’s lack of focusing screen probably won’t be a problem. The D30’s autofocus is accurate and usually quite fast, but there’s enough of a lag that capturing fast-motion action at just the right moment can be difficult: Sports photographers may want to let this bargain pass them by. For the great majority of other uses, the autofocus speed should be fine.
Pro photographers might also be a little frustrated with the D30’s slow drive speed, or burst rate. Capable of 3 frames per second for 8 frames at high quality, the D30’s drive mode is plenty fast for most users, but slow when compared to that of pro cameras.
The D30 also includes a Servo tracking mode, which will track a moving object within the frame and keep it in focus. When used with the Drive mode, your frame rate will drop to roughly 2.5 frames per second — again, too slow for demanding sports photography. Still, for the rest of us, the D30’s servo mode works very well for shooting objects that are moving in a reasonably predictable way.
Three metering modes are provided: Evaluative, which is a 35-zone matrix system; Partial, a spot meter that uses a fairly large spot; and Center-weight, which functions like the matrix system but lends more weight to the center zones. We found the D30’s metering to be excellent and rarely needed to leave the Evaluative mode.
The D30 provides five ISO settings ranging from 100 to 1600. ISO can be changed through the camera’s menu system, or you can assign ISO control to one of the camera’s buttons, allowing you to change speed without having to hit the menus.
In addition to its auto white balance, the D30 includes a number of pre-set white balances such as daylight, tungsten, and fluorescent. Though these pre-sets worked well, we would like to have seen a “fine-tuning” adjustment like the one found on the Nikon Coolpix 990. The ability to tweak a setting to be warmer or colder can be handy for shooting in shadows or under slightly brighter or darker lighting conditions.
You’ll also find an excellent manual white-balance mechanism. To define a manual white balance, you simply shoot a picture of a white card. The manual white-balance mode, accessed from the camera’s menu system, lets you choose a picture to use as the current white-balance setting. With this mechanism, you can easily store different white-balance settings for different light setups and quickly switch between them.
Like most higher-end cameras, the D30 provides a custom-function feature, which lets you activate or deactivate special features on the camera. The D30 includes 13 custom functions ranging from noise reduction for long exposures to the ability to lock up the mirror to reduce vibration. The camera’s custom-function assortment is comprehensive and easy to access.
The D30 ships with a rather small lithium-ion battery, but don’t let its small size fool you. You can get a lot of use from a single battery charge: Canon claims a battery longevity of as many as 500 shots, and we never were able to drain the battery in a single day of shooting, whether because of the lower power requirements of the camera’s CMOS sensor or good battery design or some combination of both. The camera ships with a charger that can handle two batteries, and that also functions as an AC adapter.
Image Quality
One of the most curious things you might notice about the D30’s mode dial is its lack of playback mode. When you want to play back your images on the D30, you don’t have to switch modes or wait for the camera; you only have to hit the Play button located on the rear of the unit. Your last image will appear on the 1.8-inch LCD screen, and you can quickly scroll through the images using the rear control wheel. A thumbnail view of your images is provided as well as a simple zoom control, and the camera’s Info button provides full image stats, including a histogram.
The D30’s playback feature is exceptional for two reasons. First, it’s incredibly fast. Scrolling through images and deleting them is almost instantaneous, and using the D30 makes you realize how lousy the performance is on most digital cameras, even those in the $1,000 to $1,500 price range. Second, at any time, you can half-depress the shutter button and the camera will immediately shut off its screen and be ready to shoot. The D30 is always in shooting mode, meaning it’s a seamless process to shoot, review, and shoot some more.
The camera shoots at two resolutions — 2,160 by 1,440 and 640 by 480 — each with 2 levels of JPEG compression. In addition, the D30 provides a Raw image mode, which in this case stores the raw image data exactly as it comes off the sensor (without processing that would normally occur before storing a captured image, compressed or otherwise). Canon’s Raw format lets you store uncompressed images in as little as 3 megabytes, with the added advantage of extra post-processing features. Then, running the included Raw import software on your PC, you can apply all of the white balance, sharpness, and color adjustments that the camera would perform, but with the freedom to change settings when you import the image. Unfortunately, the current version of the software is slow and offers few amenities.
The D30’s image quality is exceptional. Metering is almost always dead on, the camera exhibits no discernable color shifts or artifacts, and the images are almost completely devoid of noise all the way up to ISO 400. The D30’s images, in fact, exhibit far less noise than any digital camera this reviewer has put through its paces, including the Nikon D1.
In most cases, the camera’s auto white balance works very well. It’s pre-set white balances are also fairly accurate, though we did find that the camera’s daylight white-balance setting was thrown off by our UV filter and produced images that were way too warm. If you’re unsure about your current lighting, it’s definitely best to set white balance manually.
Many people have complained that the D30’s images are soft, and they certainly are softer than what most digital cameras produce. Sharpness is largely a factor of lens quality, of course, but with digital cameras it also depends greatly on the sharpening algorithms used by the camera, and the D30’s images will probably be a bit softer than you would expect even with an expensive EOS lens. This appears to result from a conscious decision on the part of Canon: The camera’s internal sharpening can be boosted to a more aggressive setting, the images sharpen up just fine with a simple Unsharp Mask filter, and images proved exceptionally well detailed during testing. We definitely prefer an image that’s a little soft and that can be sharpened to an image that has been oversharpened by the camera and can’t be fixed.
Conclusion
There’s really very little wrong with the D30. Certainly, we have some quibbles with a few features here and there, and of course — like all cameras — there are times when you have to coax its metering in the right direction. But overall, the camera’s excellent design and performance make it a joy to use. The final arbiter of camera quality should be its images, of course, and the D30 delivers. Excellent metering, good color reproduction, and extraordinarily low noise make the D30 a steal at $3,000.
Editor’s Note: As we prepared to post this article, Canon announced a recall of the D30 to resolve a firmware problem that can affect battery life. For more information, click here.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on February 7, 2001
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