Canon EOS Rebel T3 photo samples

In the T3, Canon maintains its reputation for excellent photo quality.

Lori Grunin

July 8, 2011 1:40 p.m. PT

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Noise

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.