The crops reveal a smooth image with no undesirable artefacts to worry about, although like the EOS 40D and the Sony A350, the sharpening levels are quite modest by default. This of course gives you greater flexibility later, but you may still prefer to increase the in-camera sharpening by a notch.

As before it’s a very smooth image with no noise or processing artefacts.

Again the crops appear slightly soft, but a boost in sharpness can coax out plenty of detail if desired.

The 450D’s AF system tracked the approaching boat without difficulty.

Pixel-peeping at 100% reveals the increase in sensitivity hasn’t had a detrimental effect on the image quality, unlike the equivalent shot from our Sony A350 gallery which exhibits a faint smattering of noise.

The 450D has done a fair job of balancing ambient light with the flash and produced a natural-looking result.

Again the crops reveal lots of noise-free detail which can handle additional sharpening if preferred.

We shot this in Program mode, but a larger depth of field could have been achieved in Aperture Priority.

The increase to 400 ISO hasn’t had any detrimental effect on this particular composition, with the crops again showing lots of detail and no undesirable artefacts.

It’s quite a forgiving subject though, so let’s move indoors…

Like some cameras, the 450D’s metering has been tripped-up here by the bright background and as a consequence has underexposed the foreground.

The crops certainly reveal more noise than in the previous well-lit example, but the 450D is still retaining plenty of detail.

As you’d expect, there’s a decrease in quality when viewed at 100%, but we’d say the result is preferable to that of the Sony A350, and you can still apply sharpening without greater revealing the noise artefacts.

The built-in stabilisation has also eliminated any camera shake in this exposure.

The crops reveal a significant increase in noise and processing artefacts with a softening of ultimate detail.

Like most DSLRs these days, you’d prefer to use the 450D at 1600 ISO only when you really needed to, but again we’d say the quality at this sensitivity has the edge over the equivalent shot taken with the Sony A350.