Willow Pattern

The Canon EOS 30D is an 8 MP digital camera available new from February, 2006 to August, 2007. The controls and the menu are nearly identical to the Canon EOS 5D (i.e. the original 5D retrospectively known as the ‘Mark 1’). The two cameras share the same battery. Useful to know if you want to use full frame (5D) and crop sensor (30D) in parallel.

I bought mine on eBay in February, 2015 for under £60, chiefly to use with M42 screw-thread lenses which don’t work very well on Nikon, and other, digital cameras (though they work nicely on Pentax digital cameras as well as Canon).

Later, I bought a used EOS 40D. The menu was nearly unintelligible compared to the 30D; it was not as nice to hold; and the increased megapixel count of 10 conferred no discernible advantage. At 1600 ISO pictures were noisy and the only useful benefits that I could detect were slightly faster auto focus (when used with auto focus lenses of course, and not much use with old manual optics) and a slightly larger rear screen.

A professional wedding photographer named Richard Barley has posted on YouTube a video review of a 30D he bought in 2017 for £77 (ha! he thinks that was cheap) and it is worth enduring his rambling presentation to grasp what a fine instrument this is. (Why do YouTube people never prepare and learn a script?)

The predecessor EOS 20D is pretty much the same specification as the 30D but with a smaller screen on the back. Reviewing exposure and focus is therefore more challenging, but otherwise it too is a useful camera and must be so cheap now that a memory card costs more. People bought these cameras for high days and holidays. If you can find one that has spent its life mostly in a cupboard I would recommend it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFNhWE8vAeM