Should You Upgrade Your Canon EOS 10D to an EOS 20D?

[Updated 10/19/04] Oh, if it isn’t one new thing it’s another. Faster computer? Better lens? More storage? And now Canon’s gone and obsoleted your camera. Or have they? Is the 20D just an iterative improvement? Or something that means you need to write up your 10D for eBay? Don’t worry, you’re not alone in this dilemma…

Introduction
Part I: Image quality

Part II: Shooting
Part III: Low Light, Speed, and Final Conclusions

See if this sounds familiar: I’ve had my Canon EOS 10D since shortly after the camera was released – a little over a year. I’ve shot with it around the world in a huge variety of indoor and outdoor environments, and though I’ve occasionally been frustrated by this or that – slow boot times, sluggish autofocus – overall I’ve been perfectly happy with it. In fact, not even a month ago I was commenting to someone about how the "new" still hadn’t worn off. Then Canon announced the 20D.

So here I am, not actually dissatisfied with my 10D – it’s doing everything I want and doing it well – but with the upgraded model sitting out there, somehow I can’t look at the 10D exactly the same way. One could say that I’m a spoiled brat, I suppose, except that I don’t have this same upgrade mania with everything. My toaster oven is somewhere around 15 years old, and the only TV I own is a 9" black and white given to me by my parents in 1975. No, I’m afraid that, in the end, all that this upgrade desire shows is that I’m a nerd.

So I bought the 20D.

If you’ve been wondering whether you should upgrade, then read on, as I’ll be discussing exactly what’s different between the two cameras, and whether or not it’s worth the hassle and expense of offloading your 10D to buy the newer model. On paper, the 20D packs a lot of changes both external and in, but it can be difficult to decide if these changes really matter, if you’re mostly satisfied with the camera that you already have. Such is life as a nerd.

Part I – Image quality

As far as shooting experience goes, there are a number of changes between the 10D and the 20D. But, of course, the major headline statistic with the 20D is its new 8.3 megapixel sensor. Consequently, I’m going to begin this discussion by looking at what should be your final, end-all/be-all question when choosing any camera: how good are the pictures it makes? Though not a tremendous upgrade in resolution, the 20D does pack an extra 2 million pixels over the 10D. This is enough to sound signficant, but if you’ve spent much time with digital images, you know that a 2 megapixel gain is probably not going to yield a tremendous amount of detail over what you could see before.

Here’s a picture of a seed that was left on my roof by an angry crow. These images were shot using a Sigma 13mm f3.5 prime lens.

Cropping both images down to a 1:1 view of only the nut reveals the type of detail changes that you can expect to see from the 20D’s higher pixel count.

10D

20D

Obviously, though you’re not getting an order of magnitude more from the improved sensor, there’s still some welcome extra detail.

The 20D packs Canon’s new DIGIC II processor, which promises – and delivers – faster performance and, in theory, better image processing. The 20D, of course, stems from a line of cameras that goes back to the EOS D30, the world’s first digital SLR body priced under $5000. At the time, Canon was breaking new ground by proving there was a market for such a camera. From there, they expanded into the lower end with the Digital Rebel, and have thoroughly improved their higher-end with a bevy of beefy pro cameras. The 20D is the first model to be engineered as a true middleweight in their lineup. As such, it pulls some features from both the lower-end Rebel – S lens mount, higher pop-up flash – and the higher end pro cams – much faster performance, improved autofocus.

One of the Rebel influenced characteristics of the 20D is that it now comes out of the box configured to shoot with a little more contrast and saturation. You can dial it back to shoot more like the 10D, if that’s what you’re used to, but the default settings are a little more "aggressive" in the same manner as the Rebel.

For some reason, my camera came out of the box configured to shoot with Parameter Set 2, the 10D-like settings. This was a little disconcerting at first because, the fact is, the 20D’s 10D-like settings aren’t quite as good as the 10D.

10D

20D

When configured this way, the 20D’s blacks are not as strong as the 10D’s, resulting in images that seem slightly less saturated. In addition, the 20D tends to shoot brighter. The 20D’s images are in no way bad when shooting in this mode. But when you’re used to the 10D – and especially when you’d performing side-by-side comparisons – it is noticeable.

Switchiing the 20D into its preferred defaults – which include slightly more sharpening, a contrast boost, and a saturation boost – you begin to see superior images coming straight out of the camera.

10D

20D

Though these images are a bit shady (sorry, but the clouds wouldn’t break here when I was performing my initial comparisons – an omen of some kind?), you can see that the 20D delivers punchier color and deeper saturation.

Plainly, the differences that I’m talking about here are tiny, and either camera can be tweaked in either direction to shore things up. The simple conclusion is that the 20D does not provide a tremendous gain in image quality, save for the additional resolution (which might be significant, depending on your shooting and output needs). Nevertheless, if you upgrade, you might need to perform a little tweaking to get the results that you’re accustomed to.

 

Part II – Shooting

Personally, one of the big appeals for me with the Canon SLRs has always been their external interface. Nikon SLRs also shoot beautiful images, but Canon’s interface just makes more sense to me. I feel like there are far fewer buttons and, more importantly, much less "hold this while turning or pushing that" kind of controls. Fortunately, Canon has not messed too much with an already good thing, and the changes they have made make sense.

As a 10D owner, when you first pull the 20D out of the box, the thing you’ll most likely notice is the difference in the back of the camera. Gone is the separate power switch for deactivating the control wheel, and the main power switch now includes an extra position. With this single control you can now power up the camera with or without the control wheel activated.

The other big change to the back of the camera is the addition of a new joystick controller that can be used for scrolling around images during playback, controlling the new white balance fine tuning feature, and selecting an autofocus point. The joystick is a big improvement for scrolling – though I don’t spend a lot of time reviewing images up close on the camera’s LCD – but for autofocus point selection, I can imagine how it might be a little hard to reach for someone with small hands.

Nevertheless, if you’ve been worried about having your shooting workflow disrupted by major interface changes, you can rest assured that this camera works like the camera you’re already used to, albeit with some small changes here and there that may surprise you at first, but that you’ll quickly get used to. (For example, in the LCD status window on the top of the camera, a couple of items have been moved around.)

Flipping the power switch reveals one of the 20D’s best new "features," the seemingly instantaneous boot time. If you’ve ever missed a shot on the 10D because you had to wait for the camera to boot or wake from sleep, you can be assured that that won’t happen with the 20D. With the 20D, when you miss a shot, it’s probably your own fault.

The body has a number of design changes, mostly in the form of changes to its corners and curves. To be honest, if you had to pick up the 20D and figure out what was different in its physical design, you’d have a hard time picking out everything. Some things are obvious – the embossed "Canon" logo on the front of the camera – but many others only reveal themselves in direct comparisons. This is good news for those who are worried about getting a radically different camera from what they’re used to.

The one physical change your hands will notice right away is the reduction of the molded hand grip on the right side of the camera. I don’t think this actually makes the camera any less secure – there’s still a sturdy lip underneath the shutter button – but it sure feels different.

Technically, the 20D is lighter, but if you were hoping to take a load off your shoulder – or reduce enough weight to make it reasonable to carry yet another lens – then you’re out of luck. When holding the 10D and the 20D side-by-side, it’s very difficult to feel any significant difference in weight. If you want something easier to carry, upgrading to a 20D is not the solution.

Another feature cadged from the Rebel is the new EF-S lens mount which makes the 20D compatible with all three Canon lens series’. The advantage of the S mount is that S-lenses can be designed to position their rear-most element closer to the camera’s focal plane. To facilitate this, the camera must have a smaller mirror and pentaprism. As in the Rebel, this can result in a viewfinder that’s a little bit smaller and noticeably dimmer. This was potentially the biggest drawback to upgrading from the 10D, but fortunately there’s no discernible difference to my eye between size and brightness of the 10D and 20D viewfinders. The 20D’s viewfinder is still not as nice as what you’ll find on a higher-end film or digital SLR – it’s a little cramped, and not as bright, and you’ve really gotta mash your nose against the back of the camera to get a good view – but you won’t take a viewfinder hit if you decide to make the switch.

You will have a viewfinder with a very different quality, though. Canon has changed the 20D’s focusing screen from the perfectly clear screen of the 10D to a screen that has a slightly grainy pattern. The pattern is actually kind of pretty, and whether one is better than the other is impossible to say. Others might have more of an opinion about this. If you’ve found yourself very picky about viewfinder quality in the past, then you’ll want to be sure to look through a 20D before making any kind of final decision.

Canon has skipped a potential improvment in that the 20D still doesn’t have any kind of manual focusing aid built-in to the screen. Yes, I know these are expensive, and no, I don’t do that much manual focusing, but for $1500 it’s frustrating to not get a feature that was available on every manual film camera I’ve ever owned.

The most obvious change in the viewfinder is the new diamond-shaped, 9-point autofocus system. Practically, the new system doesn’t take any time to get used to and really requires no change in shooting flow. And if it does look a little strange to you at first, you’ll quickly stop caring when you feel the speed improvement in the camera’s autofocus system. Though not as dramatic as the focus improvement between the D60 and the 10D, the new autofocus system in a very welcome improvement over the 10D.

The status readout at the bottom of the viewfinder is identical to the 10D’s, but with the inclusion of an additional icon that shows white balance tweaking. The viewfinder is still missing is a readout for current ISO setting, a frustrating omission that means you still have to take your eye away from the viewfinder to figure out what ISO you’re shooting at.

The shutter release feels the same as the 10D – not too trigger-happy, but solid and easy to press. The shutter sound is the single biggest disappointment with the 20D. The 10D’s cool-sounding high-tech shutter sound has been replaced with a very mechanical, Rube Goldberg-sounding shutter. The mirror slap is very pronounced and the shutter is simply louder, which can be significant for wildlife shooting or surreptitious people shots.

If the camera sounds more like a Rebel, it’s pop-up flash also appears to have been swiped from that camera. This is a very welcome change that potentially results in less red-eye, and definitely reduces shadows when shooting with larger-diameter lenses. Overall, flash performance seems very improved.

So, from an everyday shooting perspective, there are a lot of changes to the 20D, but none of them are so drastically different from the 10D that your ability to get a shot will be compromised. Many of them are very welcome – improved focus speed, better flash, faster boot times – and those that are questionable – wacky shutter sound – are not deal-breakers.

 

Part III – Low-light, Speed, and Final Conclusions

Since the D30, Canon’s CMOS-based SLRs have been known for their breakthrough price/performance, and for their silky-smooth, amazingly-noise-free images. When the 20D’s specs were announced, (or "leaked," depending on which photography sites you read) many were dismayed to see that Canon had increased the pixel count without increasing the size of the sensor. Because it’s generally accepted that smaller pixel size equates to more noise, it seemed difficult to believe that Canon could preserve their excellent noise response in the new camera.

Most users would have been perfectly happy if the 20D yielded 10D noise levels with increased resolution, but somehow Canon has actually managed to improve on the 10D’s noise response while adding an additional two million pixels. Obviously, at lower ISOs (100-400) you’ll see no change in image quality, simply because the 10D already produces noise-free images at these speeds. It’s at ISO 800 and up that you’ll see the change with the 20D. Though I’ve always found ISO 800 to be perfectly acceptable on the 10D, it does yield images with visible noise. Not so on the 20D. Similarly, ISO 1600, which was usable but approaching grungy on the 10D, is now astonishingly clean. Probably the biggest surprise is that ISO 3200 is now far more usable.

You can see a few low-light samples from the 20D by checking out the “Shooting in the Dark” feature.

 

ISO adjustability provides far more than improved low-light performance, of course. The ability to shoot "clean" images at higher speeds provides a third exposure parameter that you can use to gain additional exposure flexibility, and therefore greater creative control. To further take advantage of the camera’s high-ISO capabilities, Canon has increased the maximum shutter speed on the 20D to 1/8000th of a second, which gives you a little more room to effectively use ISO 1600 and 3200 in brighter light.

In addition to the resolution increase, probably the biggest advance on the 20D is speed. As discussed already,the camera boots up instantaneously, has a faster autofocus mechanism, higher ISOs – but it’s also just generally speedier in every function from burst speed to menu display. I have rarely been frustrated with the speed of any of the 20Ds predecessors, but this has usually been because most other cameras (Nikon SLRs notwithstanding) have been so much slower. Nevertheless, it seems impossible now to go back to the slower performance of the 10D.

You’ll first notice the speed difference with basic shooting. Review images pop up much faster than on the 10D, and no longer require an initial low-res pass. Similarly, switching to playback mode is noticably faster, as is scrolling or jumping through images, and zooming and panning. (Panning is also easier and more convenient thanks to the new joystick control.) For all my tests, I have used nothing more than standard, no-frills SanDisk media. Even with this "slower" media, image review and playback times are much faster than on the 10D. (Another playback note: Canon has pulled another page from the Digital Rebel. The shooting image review now displays in whatever mode you last used in playback mode. So, if you switch to playback mode and turn on the Histogram display, when you switch back to shooting, the image review will display the Histogram. This is a convenience that is a much-appreciated improvement.)

The camera’s burst speed has been nearly doubled to 5 frames per second, a significant improvement in shooting speed. This improved drive speed would not be practical without overall improvements to the camera’s processing and buffering, but fortunately those improvements have been made. In my tests, the camera easily maintains 5 frames per second for around 20 frames, when shooting in high-quality JPEG mode. When shooting raw, it consistently pops off 6 frames at five frames per second. In both cases, the camera’s recycle time is startling. After shooting a burst of 6 raw frames, the camera is ready to shoot annother 2 frames after only 1 or 2 seconds. Unless you’re a hardcore sports or wildlife photographer, the 20D should provide more burst capability than you’ll ever need.

What’s perhaps more significant, in terms of performance, is that the camera allows you to do other things while data is being written to the card. For example, I tend to use Drive mode for portraits and auto-bracketing. The ability to shoot three bracketed frames with the push of a button is a tremendous convenience. However, on the 10D, you have to wait until the camera is done writing the burst before you can return to the menu system to make any adjustments (such as changing the auto bracketing interval, or turning auto-bracketing off). When shooting raw to a slow card, this can be a tremendous inconvenience.

This problem is solved on the 20D, thanks to its superior speed, throughput, and processing ability. Shoot a burst of images, hit the Menu button, and you’re ready to reconfigure the camera and keep shooting. More than anything else, I feel like the speed improvements to the camera have been reason enough to upgrade.

There are very few new features on the 20D. The camera has a fancy new white balance biasing adjustment, but since I tend to shoot raw – especially in situations of questionable white balance – this is not a particularly exciting addition. I’m very pleased with the new parameter set features, the most important of which is the abillity to set color space independently of other parameters (the camera also writes out Adobe RGB images with the file prefix _MG instead of IMG, to make it easier to see which files were shot in which space). The camera also provides a new Black and White mode which includes the ability to apply virtual colored filters to improve contrast, and separate filters for toning.

No Filter

Red Filter

Sepia Tone

These are fun features, and handy if you absolutely need black and white results straight out of the camera, but I still prefer to shoot color and performan my black and white adjustments and correcetions in Photoshop.

So should you do it? Is it worth upgrading?

In terms of the numbers, the 20D is definitely a better camera than the 10D. However, only some of these numbers might be relevant to you, depending on the type of shooting you do. Obviously, if you like to create very large prints, then the extra resolution will be a welcome addition. But if you don’t tend to go much beyond 8 x 10", then the larger sensor won’t afford you much new, save for the ability to crop and enlarge smaller details, and a possible gain in sharpness in your prints.

The camera’s improved burst speed and overall performance gains are great for shooting dynamic subjects. As I said earlier, I like a speedy burst mode for shooting portraits, and for performing auto-bracketing, and the 20Ds performance improvements make these types of operations much more reasonable. If you tend to shoot single frames at a pace that the 10D can handle, then there’s little need for a faster camera – after all, the 10D is hardly sluggish.

Similarly, if you rarely adjust ISO – or if you keep your 10D running at 400 or under – then the 20Ds better noise response won’t mean much to you.

As mentioned earlier, the camera doesn’t really pack any significant new "features" unless you count the addition of the EF-S lens mount.This can be a signficant bonus if you’ve been frustrated by the expense of wide-angle lenses for your 10D, or if you like the thought of being able to buy smaller lenses that maintain a high level of quality, such as the new 10-22 S lens. An S-compatible mount, therefore, may prove a great advantage in terms of flexibility.

The most important factor in choosing or upgrading any camera, of couse, is image quality, and the 10D yields excellent image quality. But the 20D’s is better. This is largely due to the higher res and better noise response, so you’re probably only going to notice the improvements if you print or crop at sizes that reveal the improved res.

As should be obvious by all these disclaimers, the 20D is not a slam-dunk, obvious upgrade, but this is largely because the 10D is such a good camera. Personally, I think the upgrade is worth it for the type of shooting I do. Also, other users might have been more frustrated by the 10D’s troublesome autofocus and ISO 1600 noise. If you can answer any of the questions above in favor of the 20D, then it’s probably worth it to you to make the switch.

If you’d like to see more 20D image samples, check out the Don Byron Ivey Divey gallery.

POSTSCRIPT: Three days after posting the first part of this article, my 15-year-old toaster oven died a somewhat violent death while toasting a day-old bagel. Sadly, I replaced it with a new model and have vowed to only toast fresh bread. I haven’t yet had the nerve to try out the 1975-era black and white TV.

[10/17/04] Was hoping to not have to lug my powerbook to a shoot today for image offloading. Unfortunately, my Belkin CameraLink for iPod, is not working with the 20D. Neither the 10D nor 20D are listed on the Belkin compatibility chart, so if you depend on this configuration for field storage, you’ll need to re-consider for the time being.

[10/19/04]If you’re wondering how the 20Ds extra resolution might impact your storage requirements, you’re right to be concerned. The 20D does gobble more space than the 10D, particularly if you shoot in the camera’s Raw+JPEG mode. On average, the 20Ds raw files weigh in at around 6.2mb each, though this can go lower or higher. Finest quality JPEG files measure 3.2mb each. At highest res, 20D images measure 3504 x 2336 pixels, vs. the 10D’s 3072 x 2048.

Another way to compare: sticking a 1 gb card in the 20D yields 220 high-quality JPEGs vs. the 10Ds 355. Selecting Raw + high-quality JPEG allows for 69 images on the 20D, and 111 on the 10D. If you don’t need the JPEG, though, you can set the 20D to Raw only, which provides enough space for 102 images. These are the camera’s initial estimaes, of course. Depending on final file size, your results may vary.

Related Links:
Canon EOS 20D Review
Canon 10-22 EF-S review
Should you buy a Rebel XT or EOS 20D?

Buy an EOS20D at Amazon.com.

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