Canon’s EOS-350D is the successor to the enormously successful EOS-300D. When it was launched in August 2003, the 300D spear-headed the market for affordable digital SLRs. The 300D was soon joined by several respectable rivals, most notably Nikon’s D70, but few managed to compete at its often heavily discounted price point.

Then in February 2005, Canon announced the EOS-350D which improved on many aspects of its predecessor. Most obviously it’s smaller, lighter and features two additional megapixels. Under the hood there’s many additional improvements including a faster image processor, quicker handling, improved burst mode and a number of functions annoyingly absent (or disabled) from the 300D.

In this review we’ll take an in-depth look at the 350D. Since many people may be considering upgrading from an existing 300D or perhaps wondering how much of a step-up the 20D would be, we’ve also compared the 350D against these models.

One final note on regional variations: in this review we have used Canon Europe’s product naming convention. Readers in the USA should substitute Digital Rebel for the 300D and Digital Rebel XT for the 350D. Readers from Japan should substitute Kiss Digital for the 300D and Kiss n Digital for the 350D. The unit tested was running Firmware 1.0.1.