Introduction

Just two years ago, Canon showed the photography world its technological prowess by introducing the prosumer Canon D30 digital SLR, powered by a 3-megapixel sensor. Not only was the D30 developed totally in-house by Canon, it utilized a CMOS (Complimentary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) sensor when the rest of the competitors are using CCD (charge-coupled device) sensors. The controversial issue of CMOS performance was put to rest by the good performance of the D30, and the camera succeeded in retaining the hordes of Canon users swayed by the Nikon D1 and Fuji S1 Pro. Soon later, Canon upped the stakes in digital SLR by introducing the professional EOS 1D, which gained critical acclaim for fusing fast shooting speed with high performance. Once again, the photographic community was waiting for a successor to the D30 that can deliver higher resolution with faster autofocus. The answer is here with the all-new Canon EOS D60...

 
Using an identical chassis to its predecessor, the new D60 packs superior performance using an improved CMOS sensor and revamped autofocus. Users of the D30 will be totally at home with the D60, which retained the user-friendly layout of its predecessor. 

One of the first thing that I noticed upon starting up the D60 is that it is incredibly easy to use. All the controls were well-defined and spaced out, with clear markings denoting its function. Even being a non-Canon user, I've no trouble at all figuring out how to operate the camera. It speaks very highly on the user-friendliness of the D60, especially considering the fact that that this is a prosumer class digital camera packed with advanced technology. 
Ergonomics and handling of camera controls
The layout of the camera remains essentially the same as the predecessor D30. Looking at the back view, the on/off switch is located on the top left hand side, with raised profile to make it easier to operate. The on/off switch on top of the main command dial is confusing to many non-Canon users, since its main purpose is to lock/unlock the command dial. 

Other controls are clearly denoted. For example. the magnifying glass allow you to view a magnified image of the photos shot, and the checkered box denotes thumbnail image viewing of all the images. Instant playback is easily done with the playback switch located at the bottom left. Should a photo opportunity occur when you're admiring your images, simply half-depress the shutter release and your back in shooting mode!  

 
The main command dial rotates assuringly to allow you to scroll through the menus quickly and easily. The layout of the menu is excellent, which means you do not have to spend time familiarizing or remembering where each item is hidden. In fact, other than the more cryptic custom settings, most users of digital cameras will be right at home with the Canon D60. Simply scroll along the drop-down menu, press the set button (located in the middle of the dial) to enter the sub-set menu, choose your option and viola... you're done! 

 
Handling is also excellent with the camera cradled snugly into my hands. All the controls fall nicely into place, although I suspect that photographers with large hands will find the camera slightly too small. The buttons have a great springy feel to them, and they are small nor recessed deeply to require fingernails to operate them. The shutter release button has a nice contoured groove for your index finger, and the bluish green-illuminated LCD is a huge relief for photographers having to work in dim condition. This is a simple but major improvement over the D60. And at lightweight 855g, the D60 is a pleasure to carry around town but there were times I wished for a heavier body that will balance more nicely with professional "L" lenses like the f/2.8 zoom lenses.
 

I get intimidated by LCD displays of many cameras, but I simply love the Canon D60 LCD. You can say it's love at first sight. The white balance mode of the camera is displayed on the left column of the LCD, and the symbols are pretty easy to understand (whether its automatic, florescent, tungsten, flash etc). Most of the important information can be found in the LCD or viewfinder display, even in the dark. Some photographers put little importance to minor stuff like this, but to me such details affect the handling of the camera, to the extent that it could turn me off the camera no matter how technically excellent the camera may be.

 
Canon pioneered the easy-mode dial with their original EOS cameras, prompting other brands to emulate them when beginner photographers found them useful in setting the parameters for better photography. However, photographers today prefer to use Aperture-priority, Shutter-Priority, Manual or Program modes for their daily photography. It is unusual to find such simplistic modes on a prosumer class digital camera, which makes the easy photo-modes out of place on the D60. In fact, it's akin to putting a four gear auto-transmission in Michael Schumacher's Ferrari F1 car. Canon should consider using the space on the dial for something else more befitting prosumers. 

 

 The Canon D60 also incorporates a small built-in flash, which is convenient for the times where you want to cover small events or when you're caught without an auxiliary powerful flash. For any other intent though, it is quite hopeless should you require it to cover a distance of more than 6m with its power of guide no.12 (m). Personally I would like to see the built-in flash extend a little taller, as the 17-35mm lens that I used caused serious vignetting even at the 24mm setting.

Autofocus performance

How does the Canon D60 perform? Extremely well indeed.

The performance gain in the D60 is very obvious if you are a Canon D30 owner. The major letdown of the D30 is the slow autofocus which had the tendency to hunt at low light and low contrast levels. The new D60 has eliminated this autofocus weakness almost totally, with fast focusing befitting its prosumer status. Simply half-depress the shutter button and watch the camera zip into focus almost instantaneously. Three focus points catches the focus of your intended subject accurately, making the D60 a joy to use. 

Exposure metering of the camera is very accurate for the majority of the scene, but like most other cameras it has the tendency to underexpose for reflective subjects, by about half-stop in the case of the D60. However, because you can view the images and check their histograms, it isn't such a big issue. But do note that as with most digital cameras, the LCD display always seem a little brighter than the actual image you download to your computer. But there's nothing a little Photoshop magic can't fix!

 
I took the Canon D60 to one of my favorite places for testing camera autofocusing. This is a open-air water fountain where kids love to dash about in between the spurts of water, drenching themselves in the process. It's always a challenge for the cameras to keep focus on the squealing kids dashing erratically about in-between the water columns to avoid being hit. Add more kids dashing in front of the lens to the equation and more splashes of water, and you'd have one of the most challenging tests for an autofocus camera. 

 

The autofocus on the D60 does its job admirably. In between the water sprouts and runaway kids that threatened to interrupt its autofocus, the D60 aimed at my selected subject kept its bite on the boy without much hesitation. The lens used was a Canon 70-200 f/4 USM, and the tracking was pretty smooth. Although it seemed at times through the viewfinder that the picture would be out-of-focus, the LCD image playback reassured me that at least 80% of the images were in focus, which is quite a commendable ratio of good shots.
Using continuous-servo autofocus mode, the autofocus algorithm was able to ignore temporary intrusions into the autofocus area, so kids running past for a moment were ignored (unless you lift your shutter button to refocus on them on purpose). However water sprouts that lasted for a second or more disrupted the autofocus and switched the focus onto the water droplets instead (see image on left). This however, is certainly no fault of the camera, since it is the nature of continuous autofocus. 

Technological advancements

The D60 features several technological advancements, most of which you can't see physically. For starters, the D60 retains the same fast shooting rate as the D30 of 3 frames per second for up to 8 shots, but at twice the resolution of the D30. This is indeed good news for the sports and event photographer, who can now fire away without worrying that the camera is not able to catch up with the action. The D60 utilizes a new process which writes to two memory buffers prior to recording onto the memory cards, so the camera isn't slowed down by the writing process.

Like the other professional cameras in the EOS range, the D60 features custom functions to customize the camera to your shooting style. You can set the camera to beep upon certain operations or turn it off, change the sequence of bracketing or change the click intervals from 1/2 stops to 1/3 stops for greater flexibility. Even more interesting is the ability of the Canon D60 to set custom image processing parameters like contrast, sharpness, colour saturation and colour tone. Although I wasn't able to test this feature out due to a lack of time, I am very excited by the potential of this feature to alter the look of the digital image. This could allow you to set customized modes to emulate the look of certain films, so you can effectively use different "films" for different "looks" even with a digital camera!

Another function worthy of mention here is the ability to do custom white balance, which is invaluable in tricky lighting. When you are faced with mixed lighting or situations where the pre-set white balance modes cannot effectively correct for the lighting, you can set to the custom white balance mode and point at an area where it supposed to be white, and the camera will correct accordingly. If you are picky about colour rendition in artificial lighting, this feature is unbeatable.

The info button (INFO.) button beside the LCD review panel allows you to see a detailed histogram and exposure information of the image. What's cool is that overexposed areas in the image will blink, showing you how much of the area is devoid of details. When I first saw this feature in the Powershot S30/S40, I was impressed with the feature. Canon sure did the right thing by including this feature into the D60 camera.  

The D60 is using same the Lithium-Ion BP-511 battery as the D30, which performs very well for the size. Compact and lightweight, you can easily carry an additional battery and you'd be set for an entire day of shooting.

 

Image resolution
The new Canon D60 is 6.29-megapixel in resolution - how does that translate into actual photographic performance? With the previous D30, I had to interpolate a fair bit to achieve my desired image at A4 size from my inkjet printer at 300dpi. With the D60, I just had to interpolate upwards a little to achieve the same print size, which means superior results. In addition, the higher resolution of the D60 means that more image details are captured, which is definitely a good thing. I shot an image of a menu posted outside a restaurant, set at large size with high quality JPEG format. The image is downloaded and sized to 100%, and I've cropped a portion to show just how much details a 6-megapixel sensor can cover. The results are impressive indeed - you can clearly see the words on the enlarged portion of the menu. My only regret is not being able to bring a D30 or another 3-megapixel camera to show just how much better the new sensor is.

 

Left: full image

Right: enlarged portion

 

The CMOS sensor is 22.7 x 15.1 cm in size, which means it has the same 3:2 ratio of regular 36x24mm silver halide film. Because the sensor is smaller than a full-frame film,  there is a magnification ratio of 1.6x. What this means is that your focal length are "multiplied" by 1.6 times, so a 200mm lens effectively acts like a 320mm lens. This may be a great feature for long lens users, but wide-angle users will find that their wide angle lenses are suddenly not so wide. A 20mm lens now behaves like 32mm lens, which may be inadequate for wide-angle photography. As a result, we are seeing more ultra wide-angle lenses like the Sigma 15mm which becomes a 24mm when used on the Canon D60 or most other digital SLR cameras.

As with most digital cameras, you can set two parameters when selecting the image quality. The image size  (large/medium/small) will determine the pixel dimension of the final image, while the compression (fine or normal) will determine how much compression algorithm is used. If you select image size as large and compression as fine, you'd end up with a image which is very large in file size but of high quality that will be suitable for large-size printing. The chart below shows the image file size generated for the respective sizes and compression format chosen.

Fine Normal 
Large            (3072 x 2048)  2.5 MB 1.3 MB
Medium        (2048 x 1360) 1.4 MB 0.7 MB
Small            (1536 x 1024)  0.9 MB 0.5 MB
RAW             (3072 x 2048) 

               7.4 MB

RAW mode is the native file format of the camera, which cannot be understood by the computer or any other camera. When you save in RAW mode, you achieve the highest quality possible but the file size is extremely large (because there is no compression involved). You must download the file using the supplied driver from Canon, which will convert the RAW file to 16-bit TIF files (32MB) for the maximum quality.

 

Noise levels

The Canon D60 is programmed with five selectable ISO speeds, namely ISO 100, ISO 200, ISO 400, ISO 800 and ISO 1000. The default setting is ISO 100, which gives clean results and crisp colours. The noise level is well-suppressed at this level, and you'd have to look hard to see the tell-tale digital noise in the shadow areas. Although some lab tests from another reputable website indicated that the D60 has the same noise levels as the D30 up to ISO 400 (which is a formidable effort from Canon because of the smaller photosites), I felt that the D60 has much better noise control in actual shooting conditions than the D30. Experienced D30 users could almost immediately spot the differences between the two cameras in terms of noise control. I personally find that the D60 produces images that are relatively clean at ISO 100 and 200 relatively clean, but noise starts getting noticeable at ISO 400 onwards (not objectionable though). 

 
 

Power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So said a famous theologian. I'm quite sure he was referring to humans, but it seem to apply to the D60 too. I was shooting happily with the D60 (a production model, not a prototype) when it suddenly decided that it was powerful enough to ignore my pleas not to corrupt my images.  My rebel D60 was suddenly dumping random images and corrupting others. When I tried to view the images, a cryptic question mark appeared in place of the image, with the caption "Image Corrupted" appearing beneath it. It happened from time to time, and I thought it was due to a faulty CompactFlash card. Soon there were reports from other users of the D60 that it was also happening to them, so it wasn't a isolated case. Hopefully Canon will release a firmware patch that will solve this issue. This is my only major complaint about the otherwise superb D60, but it is a serious one.

 
Colour rendition
As many others have pointed out with the D30, the colour rendition of the CMOS sensor is superb, with good colour accuracy and saturation. Some users and tests have shown that the CMOS sensor isn't that great with red, although I felt the results are more than acceptable. I've always been more concerned about the rendition of skin tones on digital cameras, which is always a giveaway because of the pale and lifeless reproduction that screams "this is shot on a digital camera!". 

As such, I'm pleased to report that the D60 ranks amongst one of the best digital SLR cameras in terms of colour reproduction when it comes to skin tone. This image was taken with automatic white balance, and shot under shady conditions, which accounts for the slight blue cast. However, unlike lesser digital cameras, the D60 isn't over the top with magenta cast, so the skin tones are more natural and comparable to neutral films like the old favorite Kodak EPP slide film. However, it still lacks the punch and saturation that great portrait slide films like the Fuji Astia 100 can produce. It would be interesting to see a shoot out between the new Fuji S2 Pro, Nikon D100 and this new baby from Canon, especially in terms of colour reproduction. 

I'd have to stress at this point that colour accuracy is important, but a completely colour accurate sensor may not give you colours that please you. I've found in numerous tests that many people (including non-photographers) who claim to prefer neutral or accurate colours, will actually pick a non-neutral picture over a neutral or accurate one. Many people prefer a more saturated picture, or the way certain blues or greens are reproduced, and not necessarily the more accurate version. So be sure to check out how each digital camera behaves before deciding which one to get.
 
Conclusion

So is 6 mega-pixel the last word in resolution? Certainly not! More pixels is certainly a good thing, allowing digital cameras to resolve more image details to match film quality, and requiring less interpolation to reach printable A4 results. As the race heats up amongst digital camera manufacturers, you can expect to see digital cameras with higher resolution, bigger sensor sizes, better signal-to-noise ratio, more accurate colour renditions, better long-exposure performance, and faster shooting rates. Looking at the Canon D60 prints from a high-end A4 inkjet photo printer, it is almost impossible to tell that they are shot on digital cameras. The signature magenta cast that plagued digital images is still ever slightly perceptible, and the details are still slightly lacking compared to film, but looking at a print that is devoid of grain is such a pleasure. The cleanliness of a digital image is where the D60 will surpass a film image, though silver-halide film will still retain its advantage in long-exposures and dark tones, where the issue of digital noise will rear its ugly head.

Will I buy the D60 or Nikon-equivalent? The quality of digital cameras have gotten so good (and affordable) that I'm tempted to say "why the heck not?". Many of the problems that put me off digital cameras in the past have been resolved, such as high costs, image quality, colour rendition, storage issues, battery life etc. That said, you must also bear in mind the shortcomings of digital cameras (noise levels in dark areas and long exposures, no full-frame sensors etc.). If these issues do not bother you that much, then seriously consider getting a digital camera. The ability to shoot near-film quality images without paying for film or processing charges is a darn compelling reasons to go digital now, especially if you shoot quite a few rolls of film daily.

Do not worry about which brand to purchase. You probably already have a sizeable collect of lens and accessories of a certain brand. You can be sure the Canon D60, Nikon D100 or Fuji S2 Pro are all more than capable of producing class-beating results, with each having their own strengths. If you have a Canon system, stick to it and get the D60 or 1D (dare I suggest?). If you already have a Nikon system, choose between the Nikon and Fuji alternatives. And do not forget, save for a copy of Photoshop and get a good inkjet printer like the Canon S820/900 or Epson 890. These will make a difference for your digital image more than any competitor brand can!

 
Click here for the specs of the Canon D60.

 

 

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