As with our first outdoor results page, there's little to differentiate the above results from the EOS 400D / Rebel XTi and the earlier EOS 350D / Rebel XT. Both show similar levels of detail and noise up to 400 ISO, and a loss of ultimate detail at 800 and 1600 ISO. Interestingly though, the EOS 350D / Rebel XT appears to deliver a slightly better result at 800 ISO, especially around the foliage which appears less detailed on the 400D / XTi.

It's a very close result though and only those closely examining 100% crops on a high quality screen are likely to notice much difference. The important thing is the EOS 400D / Rebel XTi delivers smooth, low noise results throughout its range, and while noise is visible at 1600 ISO, it's by no means obtrusive.

Note: we have compared 100% crops from each camera measuring 282x136 pixels. Since the Canon 350D / Rebel XT has a lower resolution sensor, its crops therefore represent a slightly larger area relative to the EOS 400D / Rebel XTi. Consequently any artefacts visible on the 350D / XT crops would be slightly larger and more obvious than the 400D / XTi if the image was reproduced at the same physical size.

You may also wish to compare results taken with the Sony Alpha A100 of the same section, albeit on a different day in our Sony Alpha A100 review. Note the Canon 350D / XT samples on this page are different from those on the Sony page and were retaken especially for this review.

To compare the effect of in-camera processing and compression, we took the 100 ISO sample in Large / RAW mode, and have compared both files for each camera below. At the time of writing, Adobe Camera RAW did not support the RAW files from the 400D / XTi, so we used Canon's own Digital Photo Professional version 2.2 to convert files from both it and the 350D / XT.

We used the default settings for DPP, then transferred the data to Photoshop with 16-bit tonal depth before converting to 8-bit, then cropping and saving using the same settings as the JPEGs above. We will update this page when Adobe Camera RAW supports the 400D / XTi for consistency with our existing results.

The processed RAW file from the EOS 400D / Rebel XTi at first glance appears sharper than the in-camera JPEG, but look a little closer and there's undesirable artefacts especially around the fencing. Interestingly, there's little difference between the RAW and in-camera JPEG of the 350D / XT using the file above.

Since we have used Adobe Camera RAW to process RAW images on earlier reviews, we will return to these files once Adobe supports the 400D / XTi and provide full analysis.