Product Reviews

The 450D is the successor to our previous favourite digital SLR, the 400D, and offers some significant upgrades. The resolution is up two megapixels to 12, continuous shooting has increased from 3fps to 3.5fps, the screen is a 3in LCD with live view, the battery capacity has been boosted by 50 per cent and the lens has optical image stabilisation built in. It uses SD cards rather than CompactFlash, but these are so cheap now that it's not much of an inconvenience if you're upgrading from an older EOS model.

The buttons have been rearranged to accommodate the larger screen and to give more prominence to the ISO control, which now sits next to the command dial. The Jump button for skipping quickly through saved images has gone, but the command dial now handles this function in playback mode - a much better arrangement. With dedicated buttons for everything from white balance preset to auto-focus and metering modes, adjusting settings is quick and intuitive.

The 450D raises the stakes for performance. Continuous shooting ran at 3.35fps in our tests, showing a clean pair of heels to the 2.5-to-3fps speeds of most sub-£500 SLRs, except the Olympus E-420. It was just as impressive in our other performance tests, capturing a photo just 0.3 seconds after switching on, every 0.4 seconds in the Single drive mode and every 0.8 seconds with the flash. Only its continuous RAW shooting failed to excel at an unremarkable 1.1fps.

Live view - the ability to compose shots on the LCD screen - is increasingly common on digital SLR cameras but Canon's is one of the best implementations we've seen. Exposure and white balance

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settings are reflected in the preview image, and depth-of-field previews are available, too. A digital zoom function enlarges part of the frame by 5x or 10x for pixel-accurate manual focus adjustments. Automatic focus is available in live view using contrast detection, which is extremely slow, or the main nine-point autofocus (AF) sensor, which makes the screen go blank temporarily. It's good to have a choice, but it's surprising that neither is applied when the shutter button is half pressed. Instead, the exposure lock button becomes the AF button in live view mode. Still, the upside is that the shutter release is relatively quick - live view often comes with a long shutter lag in other cameras. The only real disappointment is that the screen isn't hinged, which would make live view more useful when shooting at awkward angles.

The lens's image stabilisation was superb, allowing us to use a 1/15s shutter speed at full zoom with confidence. Most of our test shots were sharp at 1/8s, too. However, the autofocus didn't always lock on to subjects as well as it might, making them look slightly soft in some shots. Switching the AF point from Auto to Centre reduced the frequency of the problem but didn't eliminate it. Comparing the two autofocus modes in live view revealed that the slower contrast detection method tended to be more accurate than the nine-point AF sensor that's also used during normal shooting.

There was little else to criticise about the camera's output. When focus was sharp - as it was in most shots - detail levels were superb. Some noise was visible in darker areas of ISO 400 shots but it remained unobtrusive at the top ISO 1600 setting. Colours were vibrant yet natural on default settings and are easy to customise through the Picture Style controls.

There's lots to love about the 450D, but the autofocus problems are disappointing. In practice it did little to disrupt image quality, but it tainted our experience of the camera and undermined our confidence when taking shots that had to be sharp. Live view and contrast-detection focus provide a workaround, as does manual focus, but these are slow. As such, the 450D misses out on the Best Buy award won by its predecessors.