Canon EOS 1200D With Dual Lenses Camera Review

Canon is aiming to attract customers looking to upgrade or move from digital to DSLR cameras with its EOS 1200D.

Build and handling: The small and lightweight EOS 1200D is a solid DSLR camera weighing about 480 grams with the battery and card fitted inside. With carbon-fibre reinforced polycarbonate body, this is surprisingly lightweight and offers decent grip with a textured surface that makes it comfortable to hold for a longer time.

Canon saved its rear space for large 3-Inch display and quite large buttons. Virtually all of the important controls are placed at the right-hand side of the rear panel and top-mounted the shooting mode dial with a multitude of icons and letters. The large 3-inch LCD screen with 460K resolution enables to manage the settings easily and you can view the clicked images even in sunlight. The bright Pentamirror optical viewfinder offers 95% coverage of the scene, 0.80x magnification and dioptre control for people who wear specs. It also offers Creative Auto mode, which enables to change a few key settings using the LCD screen via a simple slider system for changing the aperture and exposure compensation, or background and exposure as the camera refers to them.

The camera includes several scene modes such as Portrait, Landscape, Night Portrait, Sports, a close-up and Flash Off modes etc. It also boasts drive modes including Single Shot, Continuous Shooting, Self-timer and Remote Controlled Shooting. In Continuous Shooting mode, it can capture images at a speed of 3 fps for up to 69 Large Fine JPEGs or 3fps for up to 6 RAW files.

Shooter: Canon EOS 1200D comes with two lenses with a focal length of 18 to 55mm and 55 to 250 mm. It produces noise-free quality images at ISO 100 to 800, though a little noise can appear at ISO 1600. The 18 MP APS-C CMOS sensor captures quite soft, sharp and quality images. At the default sharpening setting, it produces quite soft images, though in-camera sharpening level can be changed according to the tastes via the Picture Style options.

The EOS 1200D sports nine phase detect AF points, in which one is a cross-type sensor for more accurate focusing. The autofocus performed well in our lab tests in bright light and even in challenging subjects. The Creative Auto provides nine different options including Standard, Vivid, Soft, Warm, Intense, Cool, Brighter, Darker and Monochrome. The Auto Lighting Optimizer comes with four different setting Off, Low, Standard and Strong. It enhances the processing to even out the contrast and correct brightness. The pop-up flash makes indoor, lowlight and even night shooting easy with no red-eye and nice exposure with max shutter speed of 30 seconds.

Multiple Video Formats: EOS 1200D offers video recording at a choice of 24, 25 or 30fps. It delivers fine quality videos for casual use but disappoints at fast ISO speeds as attracts noise. It features autofocus while recording that comes disabled by default.

Long Battery Life: 1200D houses 860 mAh LP-E10 Li-ion battery that performed well in our labs test. In one full charge, it can capture 1500+ shots, in different lighting conditions,.