Should you buy a Rebel XTi or Nikon D80?

As digital camera vendors continue to slice the low to mid-range digital SLR market into narrower and narrower niches, deciding which camera to buy becomes much more complex. In addition to there being more cameras to choose from, it has become more difficult to decide exactly how much you’re willing to pay – no matter what price point you choose, there’s probably a slightly better camera priced just $100 more. Two recent entries into this market, the Canon Digital Rebel XTi, and the Nikon D80 are a prime example of this phenomenon.

Priced at $799 for the body only, the Rebel XTi is Canon’s latest update to the Digital Rebel series, and the successor to the popular Rebel XT. The Nikon D80 is the long-awaited successor to the Nikon D70s, and is priced $200 higher than the XTi, at $999. The Rebel XTi offers the same compact design as the Rebel XT, but with a higher-res sensor, and some interface modifications. The D80 also offers a resolution increase over its predecessor, as well as better performance and a greatly expanded feature set. (Both cameras yield 10 megapixel images.) But how do the cameras compare to each other, and how might you decide between them? In this article, we’ll take a side-by-side look at the two cameras.

Design and Build
Both of these cameras are very small, with the Canon coming in a little bit tinier in every dimension. Because of their small sizes, you’ll definitely want to get your hands on both of these cameras before you make a final decision. If you have large hands, you’ll need to pay close attention to both comfort, and the security of your grip on both models.

I was never a fan of the feel of the Rebel XT – in my hands it was simply two small, leaving my fingers cramped and uncomfortable. With a large lens on the camera, the balance felt very strange. The XTi is a little better, but not by much. Canon has changed the shape of the hand grip making for a less cramped feeling, but the D80 feels much better in the hand, and more secure. Though the cameras have a very similar weight, something about the D80 design makes it feel better balanced when working with a large lens.

When it comes to the feel of the build quality, there’s no comparison. The Rebel XTi has the same cheap plastic feel of its predecessor, while the D80 has a more professional feel. A big part of this stems from the XTi’s unfinished, smooth plastic, as compared to the D80’s textured finish. However, both cameras feel equally sturdy, with no creaking or flexing. The fact is, though, the XTi is probably no more fragile than the D80, and should stand up well to years of shooting in a variety of conditions.

The D80 supports the full line of current Nikon lenses, while the Rebel XTi supports all of Canon’s EF and L lenses, as well as the EF-S lenses designed for reduced frame sensors. If you already have an investment in one of these lens platforms, you’re probably not going to find a reason to switch to the other. These are both very good cameras, and neither one offers a feature that makes it worth going through the expense and hassle of buying new lenses.

If you do decide to switch, perhaps because the other vendor makes a lens that is particularly suited to the way you shoot, then be prepared for an adjustment. Canon and Nikon lenses screw on in different directions. Obviously, this has zero impact on your ability to shoot, but it can be very confusing for a while.

Both cameras offer excellent 2.5” LCD screens, and as with all of their digital SLRs, Nikon provides an LCD screen cover that offers significant protection for this essential camera component. I’ve long wished that Canon would include such amenities.

To my eye, the D80 offers a slightly brighter, more clear viewfinder. It’s still very plainly a reduced-sensor viewfinder, but in low light especially, it’s a little easier to see than the Rebel XTi. Both cameras offer fine in-viewfinder status displays.

Interface

As readers of my other Nikon/Canon comparisons already know: I am a Canon shooter. I have been shooting with Canon digital SLR’s since the EOS 30D, and Canon SLRs are the only SLRs I’ve ever bought. Canon and Nikon’s take very different approaches to SLR interface design. Neither approach is bad, but they are very different from each other and I think it’s a very good thing that both designs exist, for it seems that there are two types of people in the world: people who like their camera controls interlocked, with a separate button for every function, and people who like an interface with fewer buttons, and that can be operated with one hand.

As with Mac versus Windows, or Quark Xpress versus Adobe InDesign, staples versus paperclips, Cream of Wheat vs. Malt-O-Meal, or whatever, your preference may come down to which interface you learned first. However, I do think the two different approaches serve two different ways of thinking, and so some people will be inherently more comfortable with one camera than another.

I’ve shot with lots of Nikon cameras over the years, and I just spent several days shooting with the D80 in Central America. Even after all that, I can still safely say that the Nikon interface just doesn’t work very well for me. Obviously, this opinion is completely subjective, and there really is no way of objectively quantifying whether one interface is better.

What I like about the Nikon interface: you don’t have to descend into the menus to adjust any crucial shooting functions; the D80 provides a tremendous amount of metadata in its playback mode; the D80 has a very easy-to-find depth of field preview button; the viewfinder is very bright and clear.

What drives me nuts about the Nikon interface: it’s very difficult to set any essential shooting parameter with one hand. All controls are interlocked, so that you can’t accidentally change a setting. Personally, I’ve never accidentally changed a setting on any of my Canon cameras, so I don’t see this as a problem. Also, given that I have some repetitive stress injury problems, having to push and hold buttons simultaneously, or to push and hold one while turning a knob is fairly hard on my hands, and not very comfortable.

What I like about the Canon interface: Very few buttons – because Canon doubles up controls on just a few buttons, the interface is very streamlined, with all of the controls in one place; you don’t have to go looking for a control. Most essential shooting parameters can be easily changed with one hand. The Canon status displays are typically more informative than Nikon’s. For example, on the D80 status display, there’s no way to tell the specifics of an auto bracketing setup.

What drives me nuts about the Canon interface: There’s no button for auto bracketing, you have to go into a menu. The Depth of Field preview button is too hard to find while shooting. Mirror lock-up is buried in the “custom function” interface.

In the case of these two cameras, there are additional significant interface differences. The D80 has a dedicated LCD status screen on the top of the camera, while the XTi uses its LCD monitor for a status display. I’ve never liked this LCD-screen-as-status-display approach on any camera, because it’s far less convenient. The XTi is better than most cameras that take this approach, thanks to the proximity detector that they include below the viewfinder. As you move your eye up to the viewfinder, the screen automatically shuts off, and re-activates when you take your eye away. After a brief interval of non-use, the LCD screen turns off.

Because the screen is usually off, you’ll need to activate it even if you want to do something simple like find out how many frames are left on your current card.

Again, these points are all very subjective, which means you’ll need to try the interfaces out yourself to determine what works for you. If you can get your hands on the cameras, try adjusting the following features:

•            Exposure compensation
•            White balance
•            ISO
•            Drive mode
•            Focusing mode
•            Auto bracketing

In addition to testing the ease with which you can change these specific features, pay attention to the feedback that you get from the camera’s status outputs, as well as how easy it is to read these displays.

If you find that either camera simply makes “more sense” in terms of its interface, then that’s probably a good impulse to follow. If you don’t feel that either one is any better than the other, then you’re probably in the “it just depends on which one I learn first” camp. You can then base your decision on price and features.

Features
While Canon dominated the consumer digital SLR market for years, Nikon has now leap-frogged them – across the entire product line – by packing their cameras with much larger feature sets.

While both cameras offer all of the features that you need on a day-to-day basis, the D80 adds a lot of extra amenities. Granted, some of these are things you might never use, but it’s nice to have the option.

With the D80, Nikon has focused on in-camera editing controls. The D80 provides a number of post-processing effects that can be applied in-camera. The “Optimize Image” command performs automatic color correction, similar to the auto color, or enhance commands that you’ll find in many image editors. Optimize Image offers a huge range of choices from vivid to softer to portrait, as well as black and white conversion. The Retouch menu provides several types of monochrome conversion, as well as cropping, red-eye correction, and D-Lighting, which is performs an adaptive lighting adjustment, just like the Shadows/Highlights adjustment in Photoshop.

While many users might think “I’d rather do those edits in my image editor, where I have more control” having these edits in-camera can be very handy if you need to deliver images quickly, or if you’re a beginning user who’s not yet comfortable using an image editor. The D-Lighting control is especially useful, and allows you to pull better-exposed image directly out of the camera. One nice aspect is that you don’t have to sacrifice your original image. The D80’s Retouching features – and there are more than what I’ve described here – are automatically performed on a copy of your image, so you don’t have to give up your original.

Though you can apply these edits to either JPEG or raw files, Nikon has missed an opportunity here by not tagging the D80s raw features with the camera’s Retouch feature. I’d like to be able to apply a D-Lighting adjustment, and then have that adjustment automatically configured when I bring the image into Capture NX.

While Canon has updated a few of the XT’s features in the XTi, the biggest improvement are the new dust-proofing features. Pulling a page from Olympus’ and Sony’s books, the XTi offers a special vibrating mechanism that shakes dust off of the sensor. Rather than vibrating the actual sensor, the XTi has a clear plate in front of the sensor. This plate is shaken every time you turn the camera on or off, so that any dust falls on a sticky pad located just below. You can specify whether you want the cleaning cycle at power on or off, or you can turn it off altogether, and trigger it manually.

Pulling a page from Nikon, the XTi also has the ability to make a noise map of your sensor. This map can then be used to perform automatic noise removal using Canon’s DPP software. Any one of these is a very good dust-proofing scheme, having both should make the camera extremely dust-proof. I didn’t have a chance to take the camera into an especially harsh environment, so I can’t speak to the camera’s dust-proofing over the long term, but these are all proven dust-proofing tactics, so you should see few dust problems with the XTi.

If you are partial to using fractional ISO increments, then you might find yourself frustrated with the Rebel XTi. While it offers the usual single stop speeds – 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1600 – the D80 offers 1/3 stop increments from ISO 100 to 1600.

For dust-proofing, the D80 offers the ability to take and store a dust reference photo, but does not offer any “active” dust reduction capabilities.

Both cameras offer matrix and center-weight meters, but the D80 also offers a spot meter with a 2.5% metering circle. Both cameras also offer full support for the advanced external flash systems provided by the respective companies, with a full suite of flash exposure compensation. Finally both cameras provide similar playback options, including a 3-channel histogram.

Additional cool D80 features that the Rebel XTi doesn’t have: the ability to add a text comment to any image (you enter the comment using an interface that’s akin to entering your name onto the high-score page of a video game – scrolling through the alphabet to enter one letter at a time); modeling flash feature that can be used with the internal or external flash units; white balance fine tuning for tweaking white balance settings.

Additional cool Rebel XTi features that the D80 doesn’t have: the ability to define Picture Styles – custom preset groups of image processing settings;.

Performance and quality

Performance-wise, both camera are very similar, offering the typical “consumer level SLR” speed that you expect in sub-$1000 cameras. Both cameras can manage around three frames-per-second in drive mode. The Rebel can shoot up to 31 JPEGs or 11 raw frames in a burst, while the D80 manages 110 JPEGs or 6 raw frames. The D80 does a smoother job of handling a full buffer, while the Rebel tends to stutter as it tries to clear out its buffer.

Other performance numbers are also comparable – boot time, shutter lag, file write times, playback speed and menu navigation are all roughly the same. If you’re shopping at this price point, don’t expect to get pro-level performance. For most users in this market, either of these cameras will deliver sufficient performance.

Similarly, there’s little discernible difference in image quality. This isn’t to say that on some shots, one camera does a better job of metering, or renders colors in a more pleasing manner, but overall most cameras consistently deliver excellent images. On the shots where we did find a difference, the latitude of change was never so great that we couldn’t edit the images to look the same.

When it comes to extreme low light shooting at high ISO, the Rebel XTi has a slight noise advantage over the D80. However, while these artifacts are visible on-screen, you’ll be hard-pressed to see them in print.

There are lots of review sites up with downloadable sample images, if you want to compare full-res files for yourself. Check out DPReview’s D80 gallery and their Rebel XTi gallery.

Conclusion
No matter which of these models you choose, you’re going to get a very good camera that is capable of delivering great images. In addition, both cameras are compatible with a world-class series of lenses that should satisfy even the pickiest image quality wonk.

That said, the $200 price difference does come at the cost of feature differences. For the extra 200 bucks the D80 delivers a nicer body and a larger feature set. In fact, except for the slow burst performance, the D80 delivers more features than Canon’s more expensive EOS 30D.

If there’s not a D80 feature that seals the deal for you, then what your decision will most likely come down to is usability – which camera feels better and makes more sense to you, interface-wise. Again, the only way to resolve this issue is to get to the store and try out both cameras.