The 50D’s Standard Picture Style has delivered a natural-looking result that’s neither too punchy nor refrained, and a close look at the crops reveals a high level of detail coupled with Canon’s trademark smoothness.

Towards the edges of the frame though, the EF-S 18-200mm suffers from coloured fringing, some of which is becoming visible even on the first crop.

Framing at a very low angle was made easier by Live View, although a flip-out screen would have been preferred.

As before where the lens is performing well, the 50D is resolving a decent amount of detail, but there’s noticeable fringing towards the periphery. This can effectively be removed on RAW files using the supplied Digital Photo Professional software, but we’d prefer it wasn’t there at all.

Image Stabilisation wasn’t strictly required with the fast shutter speed, but made composing the shot much easier by greatly steadying the view.

The increase to 200 ISO hasn’t had any detrimental effect on the crops, although again towards the edges there’s evidence of fringing.

The photo was framed in Live View with Face Detection, but at longer focal lengths it’s slow to use the contrast-based AF and much easier to use the viewfinder.

By shooting in Aperture Priority and zooming-in further, it’s possible to achieve a much smaller depth-of-field with the EF-S 18-200mm.

The increase to 400 ISO hasn’t had a detrimental effect on the image, with the crops still appearing smooth, detailed and free of noise.

The EF-S 18-200mm lens is capable of delivering sharp results at the point of focus from close range when zoomed-in, but optical issues and a small depth-of-field means the image can quickly become soft and suffer from fringing as you move away.

We used Live View and Face Detection for this shot, and once again while the frame quickly finds the subject, the contrast-based AF is slow to lock on, by which time the subject could have shifted – so it’s best to use the viewfinder for portraits.

Pixel peepers will notice very slight evidence of noise textures appearing, but it’s nothing to be concerned with here. The 50D at 400 ISO remains very respectable.

The crops reveal an increase in noise, but it’s still a good-looking result packed with detail. As seen here and in our High ISO results, the 50D’s gapless micro-lenses are maximising the sensor efficiency.

Beyond 3200 ISO though, the top two sensitivities suffer from visible noise, banding, and at 12800 ISO, red hot-spots. See our High ISO Noise pages for samples of this scene at all the 50D’s sensitivities.