A Meandering Path: A Blog of Life, Love, Retirement, and Photography: Canon SL1

Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. With Christmas approaching, the “to do” list keeps getting longer instead of shorter. I’m sure you’re up to your own elbows in pre-holiday preparations, too, so I’ll try to keep this short.

I’ve been looking for a backup camera for a while. I love my Canon 7D, but sometimes I just want something smaller and lighter that I can toss into a carry-on bag when I fly, or leave in the car for when we’re on a short drive and find something interesting. I also wanted something that my wife would be more likely to use. She has a great little Nikon point-and-shoot, but it doesn’t have much telephoto capability. I’ve been trying to get her to go back to an SLR (she has an old one from the days of film), but the size and weight have been an issue.

I tried a Panasonic Lumix, the DMC-FZ200. The size, weight, and telephoto capability were all pretty good, but I didn’t like the difficulty in setting the controls, the image quality, the viewfinder, or the rear LCD quality. Maybe I would have liked it better if I wasn’t already used to the SLR.

What I kept looking at instead was Canon’s new Rebel SL1. The ads claimed it to be the smallest, lightest SLR on the market. Another plus was its low-light capability. Its ISO range was double that of my 7D, which was being stretched to its limits by some of my early-morning shooting of birds in the bushes.

Would the SL1 be small and light enough for my wife? I decided to find out. On Thursday, I drove to Samy’s Camera Store to hold an SL1 in my hand.

Honestly, that is all I intended to do: hold it in my hand, try a few test shots with it there in the store, set it down, thank the clerk, and come home to ponder it some more.

The sales woman handed me their display model. It actually was small and light – hardly bigger than the Panasonic Lumix I had riding around in my car. And yet, it still fit my hand, and the controls were familiar, even if the touch-screen access was new.

“There’s an instant rebate,” she said. “$150 off the regular price, and we pay the sales tax.”

“Really?” Here in California, the sales tax alone would be nearly $48. That made it nearly a $200 discount.

“Yes. Really.”

“Oh.” I stopped breathing. This was unplanned and unexpected. The SL1 body alone was normally about $600, which was beyond what I wanted to spend. But $450?

The crazy, twisted thing about getting caught up in the SLR world is that your mental scale for measuring “cheap” and “expensive” gets skewed. I used to think that $200 was a lot to pay for a camera. Not any more.

“Four hundred fifty dollars, huh?”

“Yup. And we pay the tax – but only for the next few days.” There. She’d used the artificial time pressure tactic with practiced skill.

“Um, do you have a kit deal with the 18-135mm lens?”

“Not as such, but I can see what we could put together for you.”

That ended up being too much, but the $450 price on the body kept luring me back. “What’s the price if I get the regular kit deal?”

“With the 18-55mm lens, it’s another $150.”

“Okay,” I finally said. “I have lenses. I don’t really need another lens, and I don’t like that 18-55 kit lens anyway. I…. I’ll take the body.”

There. I’d done it. Yikes!

But, I took the camera home, showed it to my wife, tried it, and fell for it immediately. Side-by-side with the Lumix, the SL1 was only a tiny bit larger. The 18-135mm IS STM lens feels like it doubles or triples the overall weight, but the 55-250mm IS STM lens is hardly noticeable weight-wise, and that’s the lens that will probably live on the SL1.

Here are some of my first images from it. All were shot with the Canon EF-S 55-250mm IS STM lens: