Like the 50D before it, the Standard Picture Style has delivered a natural-looking result with a decent amount of detail and Canon’s typical smooth style. Some may find it a little soft at times, but you can always boost the sharpness if desired. The weak point in the standard kit is unsurprisingly the EF-S 18-55mm IS lens, which is lacking the ultimate bite and suffers from some fringing towards the edges.

As before, the results are smooth and fairly detailed, but there’s a lack of crispness partly due to image processing and partly to the lens in use. We also found our 500D / T1i test kit suffered from more focus-misses than average.

The increase to 200 ISO hasn’t had a detrimental effect on the crops, but again there’s a softness when viewed at 100%, and again we had to dispense with several alternative images due to focusing errors.

We believe the focusing fault lay with the kit lens supplied.

We initially tried shooting this with face detection in Live View, but while the frame locked-onto the subject straight-away, the contrast-based focusing was too slow to be practical – so we reverted to the viewfinder and phase-change system.

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.

That said, like many of the gallery samples here, there’s an overall softness to the image, even taking our issues over the supplied kit lens into account.

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 easiest to use the viewfinder for portraits.

Noise textures start to creep-in at 400 ISO when viewed at 100%, but like the 50D, it’s nothing to be worried about yet.

The crops reveal an increase in noise levels, although there’s still a decent amount of detail present here. It is interesting to compare these results against the 50D though, which appears to have a very slight advantage, most probably due to the gapless micro-lenses on its sensor.

The 500D / T1i goes onto offer up to 12800 ISO, although with greatly reduced quality. You can see versions of this scene at all sensitivities in our High ISO Noise results, and also how the Auto Lighting Optimiser handles it in our Features section.