In the T3, Canon maintains its reputation for excellent photo quality.
Lori Grunin
I've been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handed out buying advice for what seems like forever; I'm currently absorbed by computers and gaming hardware, but previously spent many years concentrating on cameras. I've also volunteered with a cat rescue for over 15 years doing adoptions, designing marketing materials, managing volunteers and, of course, photographing cats.
The T3 has very good midrange ISO sensitivity performance. JPEGs get a bit grainy, but remain usable, up through ISO 800, and start to get soft at ISO 1,600.
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At ISO 3,200, the JPEG photos don't look terrible, but you can see some color noise and images develop hot pixels. As usual, Canon's JPEG processing is pretty good. I couldn't get much better results from processing the raw versions--different, but only by trading off dynamic range for color and grain.
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Color
Overall, the T3 delivers excellent color reproduction, though in shadowed areas (like the two middle photos), the white balance gets a little too cool.
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Sharpness
In its Standard Picture Style setting (sharpness at +3), the camera plus kit lens renders very sharp images--possibly a little too sharp.
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Bokeh, 18-55mm IS II lens
The 18-55mm kit lens produces nice out-of-focus highlights.
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Distortion, 18-55mm IS II lens
Lens distortion isn't bad at its widest.
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Fringing, 18-55mm IS II lens
Like most inexpensive lenses, the 18-55mm kit lens is pretty susceptible to fringing. I didn't see any purple, however, and it tends to stay on the edges of the frame.
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Picture Styles
The default Standard Picture Style pushes the saturation and sharpness a bit more than I like, but there are no wholesale hue shifts and the Neutral style works out well if you prefer.
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Burst shooting
Even ascribing some of the blur to imperfect panning on my part, the old autofocus system isn't great if you want to shoot a lot of action. However, at relatively small sizes the results look OK and the camera's burst performance is just good enough to keep up with subjects moving in a predictable direction.
