Canon T3i Digital Camera Review

Motion

There was a fair amount of artifacting and ghosting with the T3i in video capture. We found that generally the resulting videos were appealingly smooth, though if the camera panned to either direction there is a noticeable rolling shutter effect. Exposure is fully adjustable on the camera, though, so you can adjust shutter speeds to fine-tune motion performance to your liking. More on how CamcorderInfo tests motion.

The videos out of the Canon T3i look much better than the older Nikon D5000. In addition to being 1080/30p as opposed to the Nikon's 720/24p, there is much smoother video with less artifacting from the T3i. Colors are more undersaturated with the T3i, but motion is rendered much more attractively.

The Sony A55V had some of the best DSLR video that we've seen yet, with near-perfect saturation levels and sharp motion with little flaring or ghosting. The T3i suffers by comparison, with video that is undersaturated and underexposed.

The videos out of the Samsung NX10 had better contrast and sharpness, with slightly more accurate colors than those from the T3i. However, the videos from the NX10 are heavily compressed by comparison. As a result there is far more artifacting than in the T3i, color gradation is rougher, and some fine detail is lost.

Video Sharpness

We found that the T3i with the 18-135mm kit lens produced fairly sharp results in video recording. In our test we found that the T3i was able to resolve approximately 750 lw/ph of vertical sharpness, though just 600 lw/ph of horizontal sharpness. This is an improvement over the T2i (tested with the 18-55mm lens) and is slightly sharper than what we have seen from other video-capable DSLRs. More on how CamcorderInfo tests video sharpness.

Low Light Sensitivity

We tested the Canon T3i to see how sensitive it was to light and found that it took just 8 lux of light on a lab chart to reproduce an image that reached 50 IRE on a waveform monitor. This is a fairly acceptable image that, while dark, is still visible with some degree of detail.