6. Exposure

Since they are aimed at a consumer market, both these cameras have provided for beginners a full auto "green" position (referring to a color on the selection dial.) When selected, this mode effectively turns these sophisticated devices into "point and shoot" cameras. There are also other pre-programmed result modes for specific types of pictures: Landscape, Sports, Portrait, Macro, and so on. But obviously anyone who buys a camera like this should acquire enough technical know-how to make his or her own adjustments! The result modes can't work miracles, and they can even sometimes make bad choices.

Each unit also has the four traditional exposure modes: program, aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual, which are enough to deal with any situation. One difference, however, is that in manual mode the 350D's single adjustment dial has to serve for adjusting both shutter speed and aperture, which is not very practical.

Both models have three metering modes: matrix, where the camera evaluates the exposure based on the entire image by referring to typical cases stored in its ROM; center-weighted, like matrix but giving the center of the image precedence; or "spot" mode. Naturally, most users will prefer the matrix mode, which produces very good results in almost all situations. Nikon is a little ahead in this area due to their use of 3D Color Matrix metering. The same goes for spot mode - Canon's (in our opinion) is not selective enough and thus easily becomes inoperative if you need a real spot measurement. This type of metering is of interest only to a minority of users, however, and using it requires a good level of technical know-how since it can generate major errors. In practice, both models control exposure very well in matrix mode and rarely make mistakes - but rarely doesn't mean never. For some shots, only manual adjustment (or exposure correction) can get good results.