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Manual Control Options
As one would hope from a camera of this pedigree, there are quite extensive manual control options. In addition to the usual Av (aperture value) and Tv (time value/shutter speed), there's also A-DEP (automatic depth of field) which is covered below. You can also manually set the white balance, and bracket and shift it, which is a fairly advanced range of control.
Focus
Auto Focus (9.25)
The 50D has a nine-point auto focus system, arranged in a diamond formation. Three auto focus modes are available. One-shot auto focus will focus once, and retain that focus as long as the shutter control remains half-pushed. AI Servo auto focus will continue to adjust the focus as long as you hold down the shutter button. AI Focus AF will automatically switch between the two if the subject changes from resting to moving, or vice versa.
To change the auto focus target, you can either just use the auto focus selector button on the rear, or navigate the quick menu on the LCD to the appropriate option. You can then scroll through the auto focus points using either the front or rear control wheel, or use the joystick to choose, as the eight directions recognized by the joystick match the eight outer points of the focusing diamond, and clicking the joystick selects the center.
When using Live View, three types of auto focus are available: Quick mode, Live mode and Live Face mode. Quick mode is the fastest of the three. It briefly turns off live view, lowers the mirror into place, focuses normally, and then returns to live view. While quick, it briefly blanks out the LCD display. Live mode and Live Face mode both work within live view, using contrast-based auto focus in a manner similar to a point-and-shoot camera.
When shooting in low light conditions, the 50D doesn't use a dedicated auto focus assist lamp, but rather drafts the flash into use, and shoots off a few short bursts of the powerful bulb. This has the advantage of being considerably brighter than an auto focus assist bulb, but is also far more distracting for unaware subjects.
More importantly, however, is how the auto focus feels while shooting. We found it to be impressively fast, and able to catch sharp photos without any trouble.
Manual Focus (9.25)
The manual focus depends on the lens you're using, and is usually activated via a switch on the barrel. With the bundled 28-135, the manual focus felt sturdy, and was smooth and easy to use. While in live view, pressing the auto focus select button enlarges the area you're focusing on, making it easier to properly set.
ISO (10.00)
The 50D has an ISO range of 100 to 3200, which can either be selected in full stops (100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200) or 1/3 stops (100, 125, 160, 200, 250, 320, 400, 500, 640, 800, 1000, 1250, 1600, 2000, 2500, 3200). This can also be extended to Hi1 (ISO 6400 equivalent) or Hi2 (ISO 12800 equivalent) for greater sensitivity, but with an accompanying increase in image noise. This is actually a quite impressive range of sensitivities, and even shooting without Noise Reduction, you won't see noise levels go over 5% until you shoot at Hi2. If you do use Noise Reduction, especially at its highest setting, this gets bumped down to less than 3%. See our noise testing section for more details.
White Balance (10.00)
The white balance range on the 50D is quite expansive, and while the presets could be slightly improved, the manual controls are substantial enough to deal with any situation. You can set the camera to daylight, shade, cloudy, tungsten, white fluorescent, flash, custom, color temperature or auto. We would have liked to have seen multiple fluorescent settings, as the color temperature of these lights can vary quite widely. Canon's custom setting requires you to have a suitable picture of a white or gray object in the camera's memory to draw the white balance from, contrary to the more common method of just letting you point the camera at a white card and adjust directly. It's a slower process, but it allows you to save images to use for white balancing at a later point.
Color temperature lets you manually set the white balance from 2,500K (approximately between a candle flame and incandescent bulb) to 10,000K (approximately a CRT screen) as appropriate for your particular setup. The lower on this scale a light is, the warmer/yellower it is, and the higher temperature is cooler/bluer.
You can also shift and bracket the white balance along both the green/magenta spectrum and the blue/amber spectrum for fine tuning.
Exposure (10.00)
In addition to both Automatic and Creative Automatic modes, the 50D has Program, Tv (Time value or shutter priority), Av (Aperture value), Manual and A-DEP (Automatic Depth Of Field). The program mode does have a program shift function, where you can alter the shutter speed but keep the aperture properly proportioned. This activates after you half-press the shutter button, and is controlled by the front dial.
Exposure compensation can go to ±2 EV in either 1/3 or 1/2 steps, which is pretty standard for an SLR. Auto exposure bracketing (AEB) can likewise span ±2 EV in 1/3 steps.
The 50D has an option to optimize the dynamic range, called Highlight tone priority. There's also a tool called Auto Lighting Optimizer, which will adjust the brightness and contrast of underexposed images. Both of these are are options that are activated during shooting.
Metering (8.50)
The 50D uses 35-zone TTL full-aperture metering in four metering modes: evaluative (linked to any auto focus point); partial (approximately 9% of viewfinder at center); spot (approximately 3.8% of viewfinder at center) and center-weighted average.
Shutter Speed (11.00)
As one would hope from a full-featured SLR, the 50D offers a wide range of shutter speeds. It runs from 30 seconds to 1/8000 of a second in 55 steps. There's also a bulb setting, which is only available in Manual mode. 1/8000 of a second is brief enough that you could probably shoot into the fiery heart of the sun and not overexpose your photo.
Aperture
The aperture range will depend entirely on the lens you are using with the EOS-50D. The camera does have a depth of field preview button, just below the lens release. This temporarily stops down the lens aperture to give you an accurate preview of the final depth of field, at the cost of brightness through the viewfinder.
A-DEP
One interesting mode is the rarely seen A-DEP setting, situated after M on the control dial. This is for automatic depth of field adjustment. While shooting in this mode, the entire focusing diamond is used, and the aperture is automatically set so that anything within those auto focus points remains within the focusing depth of field.
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Image Parameters