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Canon Digital Rebel XT

The Canon Digital Rebel is a digital camera aimed squarely at the segment of the market that enjoys having total control over every pixel of their photographs through the use of several hundred small dials and knobs, but who may not be able to afford the bajillion-dollar price tag that usually entails. Priced competitively at only half a bajillion dollars, the Digital Rebel has an eight-megapixel image size, can use any Canon lens and goes from fully automatic to fully manual with the flick of only one or two dials. You can even get the camera all set up manually and save the settings, restoring them later by pushing some buttons or something.

But back to the manual operation. The camera industry has spent decades of R&D and billions of dollars perfecting the automatic camera, to the point where even the cheapest cameras can automatically focus and light-meter. So when you buy this half-bajillion-dollar behemoth, you would expect that it could do all this and more, better than any other camera you’ve ever used. And you’d be right.

But that’s boring! The entire reason you spend half a bajillion dollars on a camera for your girlfriend is so that the moment she says you can poke around at it for a couple of minutes, you can turn all that stuff off, tweak all the knobs and dials and buttons and take a blurry, overexposed, sepia-tone action shot of…well, it’s tough to tell from the picture. I think it was a bug, or an airplane, or some guy walking down the street.

Which brings me back to the bit about saving your manual settings for later use. I guess it’s really easy to do that by accident. And I guess you can only save a couple different setups before it has to start erasing some. It’s also pretty difficult to figure out how to do all of that on purpose. I guess what I’m trying to say is, it would be a much nicer camera if we could figure out how to get it to go back to taking photos that aren’t blurry, overexposed, sepia-tone action shots.

Pros: Several hundred small dials and knobs.

Cons: Once you’ve screwed them all up, you’re doomed.

Dave is convinced that blurry, overexposed, sepia-tone action shots are the next big thing in photography. Send your worst photographs and vaguest, half-baked “camera techniques” to webmaster@artvoice.com.