Canon EOS 20D 8.2MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Lens
by Canon
List Price:
Our Price: $1,387.99
You Save: $12.00 (1%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $275.00 (click here)
Category: Digital Camera
See more product details
Customers in the UK,
buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: CanonRelease Date: 2009-11-30
Model: 9442a008
Product features:
- 8.2-megapixel sensor captures 3504 by 2336 pixel JPEG or RAW images
- Includes 18-55mm (3x zoom) f/3.5-5.6 autofocus lens, EF mount compatible with all Canon lenses in EF and EF-S lineup
- Direct printing with PictBridge printers
- Store images on CompactFlash memory card
- Powered by rechargeable BP-511A 1390mAh battery pack
- Canon Dioptric Adjustment Lens E (-3)
- Serif PhotoPlus X3
- Adobe Photoshop CS4 Upgrade [OLD VERSION]
- Aperture 3
- MADE Products CA-2001-BLK Seattle Sling Waterproof Bag (Black)
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Canon EOS 20D 8.2MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Lens
Customer Review: WOW! The Best Prosumer Digital SLR out there Period!
Summary: 5 Stars
Update:
I just spent three weeks in Africa in a very desolate and harsh environment with this camera. I have to add - Don't overlook the construction on your dSLR. I had heavy long telephoto lenses on it and the performance of the magnesium case, metal mounts, weather proofing, battery grip all is just amazing. I hate to imagine how a lesser plastic frame might have performed. After traveling by rattling/vibration ridden truck for days, dugout canoes in the middle of swamps, airplanes, hiking -- I came to appreciate Canon's commitment to construction. This camera and and the entire EOS system held up superbly under extremely abusive circumstances and can understand why professional photographers prefer this brand. And the pictures? Oh My, the pictures are just simply the best pictures I have ever taken in my life. Not just because of the locations but because of this terriffic equipment. My friend who had another major brand of camera complained about a muddy ant inside his lens, imagine a muddy ant inside his other major brand lens while he was shooting -- not with my Canon equipment (the sealing held up great). Albeit - he's a better photographer so he probably got amazing shots I didn't -- I didn't worry about the equipment. A+++ to Canon for the camera, the lenses, the battery grip - everything.
On other news, I just read that canon is releasing the 5D so I guess my info from the original review was correct. Its definitely a bigger higher end camera and at $3,200 definitely in a different class. I think I'll keep my 20D for telephoto work and but with its full frame sensor, I might get a 5D for wide angle photography. Again, amazing equipment from Canon.
Original Review:
I'm a first time dSLR buyer (bought the 20D from Amazon -- great service). This was a big jump for me and I read and I read before I decided on this purchase and whether I should jump into the dSLR world. I'd outgrown point and shoot a while back.
On the 20D. I agonized over the 10D and the 6megapix Digital Rebel until the 20D came out and I quickly decided on the 20D. I picked the 20D because of solid magnesium case, 9point autofocus, 8.2megapix sensor and DIGIC II, and Instant On. So even after the Rebel XT came out -- the 20D is in a different class altogether. The 20D is a professional chassis and you can use it as a pro camera -- the Rebel is for world travelers (In my opinion).
My agony now is over what type of photography I want to do. I only have the kit lens and a $79 dollar 50mm f/1.8 II ... lenses are expensive especially the good ones as I'm learning:
Here is what I've learned (intended for the new people who are wondering if they want dSLR or not). dSLR is really about the lenses and the options that you can use on the camera. You need great lenses for great pictures. This is my gradeschool version on dSLRs and lenses and I hope it helps:
The setup -- Lets suppose you are standing next to your car and on your car's hood sits your girlfriend and on the hood unbeknownst to her sits a litle grasshopper. Behind your car is a lake and in the distance there's a huge snow capped mountain. This is the difference lenses make:
Prime Lenses: Would let you take wonderful facial shot of your girlfriend (boyfriend). If the lens has a good aperture, you might be able to blur the background so you only get her beautiful face and get rid of the annoying mountain and they tend to be light and small. (Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 is a prime lens -- $350)
Super Wide Angle Lenses: Expands the foreground and compresses the background. So you'd get a picture of your girlfriend on the car which would both be huge and a lake that would stretch to the horizon and the mountain would look tiny in the far off distance. (Canon EF 14mm f/2.8L is a super wide angle lens -- $1,800)
Telephoto Lenses: Compress the foreground and magnify the distant objects. You would wind up taking a picture that would magnify the mountain in the background but your girlfriend, car, and lake would either be very small and compressed in the foreground or they wouldn't even come out in extreme telephoto lenses as you'd only get the mountaintop and cut out the rest. Your girlfriend would also wonder about your relationship at the sight of the humongous lens: good telephotos can be HUGE and heavy! (Canon 400mm EF f/2.8L is a super telephoto lens $6,000)
Macro Lenses: Let you take pictures of very small things and they tend to allow you to focus quite close in on the subject. You'd walk up to your girlfriend and she'd wonder what you were doing so close to the hood. You'd give her a peck on the cheek and then you'd close in on the little grasshopper next to her. With a macro lens, you'd could take a great picture of the little grasshopper and it would fill my frame. If your girlfriend is like mine, she'd be off the car as soon as she caught glimpse of the bug. Old stereotype here no disrespect ladies - I know a few that would put me to shame. (Canon EFS 60mm f/2.8 is a macro lens -- $450)
Zoom Lenses: Are any lenses that allow you to shift the focal length. That is to say I can make it more wide angle or more telephoto. The 20D comes with a 18 to 55 zoom lens which gives you marginal wide angle and up to 3x telephoto. Not a bad kit lens but its not USM (Ultrasonic) so autofocus is not as fast and not as accurate and can fail to focus sometimes and its not IS (Image stabilized) which lets you take clearer pictures without a tripod. (Canon EFS 17-85mm IS USM is a zoom lens that covers some wide angle at 17mm and some telephoto at 85mm -- $600). You can turn the barrel and you can change focal length!! What a wonderful invention but they're more complex with more parts than primes and the extra parts add weight and they generally affect the amount of light they let in (aperture stuff) but you don't have to change lenses and they offer more flexibility.
Now bear in mind that if you're out there in the middle of a blooming field in Georgia and start changing lenses, you can get dirt or pollen in the sensor. I only change my lenses indoors in a non windy environment.
Exposure and Shutter Speed: Exposure is controlled by the ISO sensitivity of the sensor (ISO rating is another arcane film invention basically lower the ISO number the more sensitivity to light). One of the problems with smaller sensors was noise (graininess) on the pictures at high ISO numbers. Well not on the 20D the noise is imperceptible to me. Shutter speed is also controlled by your 20D...and the 20D has a great shutter 5frames per second, up to 1/8000 of a second. Wow! So you have two out of three big components taken care of here and the 20D is first rate on a ton of other things like custom White balance etc.
A note on Aperture. Its just how much light can come into the lens (the size of the hole). The lower the aperture number f/# on the lense the more light it allows. Aperture determines depth of field (how much of the foreground + background is in focus) and it constrains shutter speeds. Now aperture is a function of lens construction -- a 400mm f/2.8 lens is humongous and costs $6,000 while a 70-300mm telephoto f/4.5 to 5.6 is $1,200 but with the 400mm lens (get this)...you can use faster shutters and freeze the action of a quarterback spinning in midair across the field on a night game (or freeze your son as he's swinging a bat in little league: ball bat and son frozen in midair!). With the 70 to 300mm, you'd have to use a slower shutter and you'd get blurr and blurry does not make the cover of the USA Today nor brings a smile to grandpa. On another example, if you've been hiking for a month to take a picture of a sloth that moves at 1cm a year in some god forsaken South American jungle, the 70-300mm lens will weigh allot less and allow you to run faster than the 400mm white monster lens. If I'm a nature photographer, I'd rather come out with the picture than fall victim to some relocated pigmy tribe because I couldn't run fast enough and have someone years later find my bones still clutching my white 40lb $6,000 lens in the middle of Brazil still attached to my 20D with a flashcard full of razor sharp gorgeously blokehed* pigmy and sloth pictures, ala blair witch project. So get a lens for what you need -- I guess is what I recommend. (*Blokeh are those out of focus circles of light in the backgrounds of pictures taken with expensive good lenses)
A word on Nikon. There are two camps of photographers these days Canon and Nikon (well there are others like Leica - but if you own a Leica you're probably a pro, don't care about feature battles and are laughing at my gradeschool analysis). The 20D is more expensive and better chassis feature for feature than the D100 - go compare 8.2megapix vs 6.1 and the list goes from there. Nikon owners will tell you that their lenses have backwards compatibility 50 years...yes but you'll have to manually focus those lenses and on some of them you have to pay some guy to saw off some metal flaps to make them fit the D100. Canon EF has been around since 1986 and there are a ton of autofocus lenses out there. EF is the standard lens mount that fits the 20D and there is a newer mount called the EF-S Mount that also fits. Canon is very conservative in their advertisement as they aim for educated consumers: D100 claims a burst mode of 144 pictures -- yes but on the low quality setting, 20D can do the same if you cut the quality down...you'll hear spot metering, megapixels, focus speed --- you need to read to understand all of this and make a sound decision. Nikon makes great cameras and I don't want to get into a war. If you already own a bunch of recent Nikor lenses -- your mind is already made up. A good friend of mine owns the D70 and another the Digital Rebel and me with the 20D -- we're all happy. After much review and a ton of reading, I liked the 20D better for my purpose as a personal preference I bought it and am very happy.
On crop factors. Lenses are still stuck in the 35mm film focal length format world and 35mm film is bigger than the sensors on the 20D and this means simply that the EF and EFS lenses turn out more telephoto on the 20D. So a lens marked 10mm is actually a 16mm (multiply mm times 1.6 to get actual focal length) on a 20D and other small sensor cameras (Rebel and Rebel XT). The crop 1.6 crop is not extra zoom -- it only appears that way, its actual lost information. So, to telephoto photographers, this means you carry more weight than you need in physical glass and to wide angle photographers, it means its harder to find lenses that do true wide angle bc the sensor is too small to capture all the information. EFS was designed so they could make smaller lenses at least so don't lose information but they're still labeled "old school" and you still have to multiply. EFS was designed to take advantage of the smaller sensors on the 10D 20D Digital Rebel and Rebel XT. The higher end Canon cameras use a 35mm size sensor. People wonder if Canon will adopt bigger sensors for all lines and if they do, then EFS will probably go the way of the dodo. On the other hand, bigger sensors are expensive to make so who knows where it will go and the 20D has very low noise at higher ISOs (used to be one of the reasons they thought bigger sensors would prevail -- that and the 35mm mindset and large number of lenses out there for 35mm). I can't predict the future -- Canon seems to be still investing in both EF and EFS though and I think that for the next 3-6 years you're fine with either EF or EFS.
I heard a rumour that Canon is planning to release a new camera between the 20D and their higher end 1Ds around December? If you must have latest and greatest and have $4,000 to spend you might want to wait. If true, I'm sure the chassis will cost $2,500 - $3,000 -- just rumours here. I'm keeping my 20D until I can make money to justify more expensive than this extremely good camera. In my opinion, this new camera would not supplant the 20D as much as it would provide Canon a more complete EOS Digital line from Digital Rebel all the way up to the 16.7megapix 1Ds -- they'd provide an true entry level Pro Camera in the $2,000 to $3,000 range. Most interesting to me will be if it has 45pt autofocus and the size of the sensor. Also interesting, Canon is releasing a new 60mm EFS f/2.8 Macro lens. Good quality and interesting choice in focal length. Amazon carries it. I think Canon is telling us something with the type of EFS lenses they're releasing and the market they are targetting. Keep watching Canon.
Back to my 20D, I've only bought a 50mm f/1.8 lens for $79 and the kit lens and a tripod. I can't wait to get a USM (ultrasonic silent 0.5 second focusing lens) with IS (Image stabilization) -- if I can only decide what type of photography. But with what I have, I've taken pictures that have floored my friends and everyone who has seen them. Someone actually said, "I'll pay you for that picture." And that is a great complement to me and to the 20D and the complement goes to the 20D because my lenses are cheap! I am a huge Canon fan now and long and short of it, the 20D is an amazing camera and the best prosumer chassis out there (period!).
More Canon EOS 20D 8.2MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Lens reviews:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Description of Canon EOS 20D 8.2MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Lens
The perfect EOS for advanced amateurs and professionals alike, the EOS 20D sets new standards in its class. Featuring an all-new 8.2 MP CMOS sensor, a second-generation DIGIC II image processor, 5 fps performance for up to 23 consecutive frames, and a 0.2 second start-up time, the EOS 20D is designed to capture richly detailed, perfectly exposed images with speed formerly found only in cameras several times the price. Other features include a top shutter speed of 1/8,000 seconds, flash sync at 1/250, a new high-precision nine-point AF system, a built-in multicontroller for fast focusing point selection, and a refined magnesium alloy body for rugged, go-anywhere photography. Compatible with not only Canon's new EF-S lenses but the entire EOS system of lenses and flashes, the EOS 20D is a professionally featured camera with a consumer price tag.Digital SLRs
Digital Cameras and Photo Categories
Bestsellers in Digital SLRs
Nikon D200 10.2MP Digital SLR Camera + Nikon 18-135mm AF-S Lens + Extra Nikon EN-EL3e BatteryNikon; Release date: 2009-11-30; Digital Camera
Best price: $2,299.00
Leica DIGILUX 3 7.5MP Digital SLR Camera with Leica D 14-50mm f/ 2.8-3.5 ASPH Lens with Optical Image StabilizationLeica; Release date: 2006-11-15; Digital Camera
Best price: $3,999.00
Remanufactured Olympus EVOLT E500 8-Megapixel Digital SLR Camera with 17-45 mm and 40-150 mm Zuiko LensesOlympus; Mac; Digital Camera
Price in other shops:
Olympus Evolt E330 7.5MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only)Olympus; Digital Camera
Price in other shops:
Canon EOS 20D 8.2MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/ 3.5-5Canon; Digital Camera
NIKON D2HS SLR 4.1 Megapixel Digital Camera - BODY ONLY (Refurbished by Nikon U.S.A.)Nikon; Release date: 2009-11-30; Digital Camera
Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 Lens (Silver)Canon; Release date: 2009-11-30; Digital Camera
Best price: $749.00
Pentax *ist DS 6.1MP Digital Camera with Pentax DA 18-55mm f/ 3.5-5.6 AL Digital SLR LensPentax; Digital Camera
Best price: $858.99
Price in other shops:
Nikon MF27 Databack for F5 35mm SLR Camera (4665)Nikon; Digital Camera
Nikon D300 inBrief Laminated Reference Cardby Blue Crane Digital
Blue Crane Digital; Blue Crane Digital; Published: 2008-03-07; Pamphlet; Book
Best price: $9.99
Price in other shops:
Similar digital cameras and accessories
Canon EF 28-135mm f/ 3.5-5.6 IS USM Standard Zoom Lens for Canon SLR CamerasCanon; Digital Camera
Best price: $320.00
Price in other shops:
Brand New Canon Bp-511, Bp-511a, Bp-508, Bp-512, Bp-514 Camera & Camcorder Battery Home Travel Rapid Charger with Car AdapteriKross; Digital Camera
Best price: $1.57
Transcend 8 GB 133x CompactFlash Memory Card TS8GCF133TRANSCEND; Windows; CE
Best price: $12.90
Price in other shops:
Kingston 19-in-1 USB 2.0 Flash Memory Card Reader FCR-HS219/ 1Kingston Technology; Windows; CE
Best price: $10.54
Price in other shops:
SanDisk 8GB/ 30MB Ultra CF Card ( SDCFH-008G-A11, US Retail Package )SanDisk; SanDisk; SanDisk; Personal Computers; Personal Computer
Best price: $25.85
Price in other shops:
Canon 2400 SLR Gadget Bag for EOS SLR CamerasCanon Cameras US; Digital Camera
Best price: $31.95
Price in other shops:
Remote Shutter Release Cord for Canon EOS 5D, 50D, 40D, 20D, & 10D Digital SLR CamerasDigital Concepts; Digital Camera
Best price: $4.99
Sandisk 4GB Ultra II Compactflash Memory Card (15mb/ s)SanDisk; CE
Best price: $15.01
Price in other shops:
Canon EOS 5D, EOS 10D, EOS 20D, EOS 30D, EOS 40D - Replacement Battery Charger (Incl. Car Adapter)Canon; Digital Camera
Best price: $1.74
Price in other shops:
Canon Replacement EOS-20D digital camera batteryBatteries; Digital Camera
Best price: $6.12
Price in other shops: