Canon SL2 First Shots: The smallest modern Rebel meets the labs of IR

posted Friday, September 1, 2017 at 10:06 AM EDT

Smaller & lighter, yet still retaining high quality output... that is what many end users have been asking for since electronics were first brought to market. The SL1 surprised the camera world four years ago with its svelte size, while still maintaing the image quality pedigree of its larger Rebel brethren, and now the follow-up Canon SL2 has finally arrived at IR.

Our First Shots are merely the initial pass through our lab, making a stop at our now-famous Still Life test target in order to get a read of how the basic images look at base ISO and as the gain rises through the available ISO levels. But it's an important step in that it allows you to see how this camera fares against its competition, its predecessor, and its Rebel kin in the exact same scene and lighting conditions using our renown Comparometer.

Even though this little Rebel looks almost identical to its predecessor, the imaging pipeline housed within is certainly all-new, with a higher-res sensor and a more refined processor. So how does this all impact overall image quality? Below are a few side-by-side comparison crops at 1:1 from our Comparometer for your inspection, as both base ISO and ISO 3200. (Note: The difference in apparent size of the SL1 vs. SL2 images is due to the difference in sensor resolution.)