I’m sooooo glad I got the EOS 300D, as I’ve just applied a firmware hack that brought to life some “dormant” features the manufacturers intentionally disabled to bring the price of the unit down.

Its been widely known that the Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel and the Canon EOS 10D DSLR’s are similar beasts. In fact, if you look at their Side-by-side comparisons you can see that most of the features that vary are catagorized as “Customizable”.

The 10D has a menu item called “Custom Functions” which allows these settings to be adjusted. Well, a fellow in Russia found that in the latest firmware, by switching a single byte in the firmware image, he was able to enable most of these 10D “Custom Functions” in the Digital Rebel. Now, some features, such as more frames in rapid shooting, are hardware-limitations but some features lacking such as Flash Exposure Compensation and embedded JPEG quality are found to be working in the 300D.

Now I dare say that it is extremely close to performing like its big brother, the EOS 10D, which is about double the price. Well performing is probably stretching it, maybe delivering is a better term.

It is common knowledge that the Rebel takes most of its technology from the successful 10D. The question is what exactly are the differences between the two, which justify their different prices.

Basically it’s versatility. The 10D‘s obviously faster, has finer construction (physical materials used) and has a TON of options and specific tweaks.

However, the most invaluable features of the 10D we’re not included in the Rebel, which made the more serious photographers shell out the extra cash… until now.

The 10Dstill is [and will always be] the better model, not simply because of it having “more options,” but by being faster than the 300D. And as much as you can hack the 300D to the point of having exactly the same features as the 10D, you can’t alter the hardware to be fast by nature (unless you overclock it)

Having said that, I still love the Rebel since I believe that with patience, skill, and the “eye,” it doesn’t matter who uses which. Hell you can even use a point and shoot and still make stunning photos. I guess I’m just really glad that I have saved about 500 dollars for a camera that was capable of delivering the same OUTPUT as the more expensive ones [if you use it right]. And with this new firmware hack, that cheap investment has now doubled in value.

Long live the REBELS!