Canon EOS 400D review

Three years ago, Canon was the only manufacturer to produce an affordable digital SLR camera.

Today, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, Samsung and Panasonic all have models that cost around ?00, but Canon has stood its ground, and its second-generation entry-level SLR, the 350D, was celebrated as the best-value SLR in our Awards issue in Shopper December 2006. This month, we finally get our hands on its successor, the EOS 400D.

The 350D and 400D look remarkably similar but there are a few obvious differences to their specifications. The 400D's CMOS sensor is up two megapixels to 10.1, while the 350D's 2" screen and passive LCD for camera settings have been replaced by a single 2.5" screen. As with Sony's Alpha A100 (What's New, Shopper January 2007), a proximity sensor below the viewfinder detects when the camera is raised to your eye and switches off the screen to avoid distracting you. The disadvantage of the larger screen is that battery life is down from the 350D's 650 shots, but 509 is respectable.

Dust can be a serious problem for SLR cameras, because if it gets inside the camera mechanism it can ruin photos. The 400D introduces a three-part Integrated Cleaning System to combat it: an anti-static coating on the sensor, a filter that vibrates to shake off dust and, for those really stubborn stains, a Dust Delete Data feature, which involves taking a picture of a plain surface so that the accompanying software can identify marks and remove them from your pictures.

In our experience, dust inside the camera is a rare problem, but when it does happen it's a serious grievance. We decided against emptying a vacuum cleaner bag into the 400D to test the cleaning system but we're pleased to see its inclusion nonetheless.

The 350D's seven-point auto-focus has been replaced by a nine-point auto-focus in the EOS 400D. The result is really fast focusing, even in low light and for relatively vague subjects. Shooting performance is much improved, too, with a 2.9fps capture rate. However, this lasted for only 30 shots at maximum JPEG quality and 10 shots in RAW mode, as the camera isn't as fast at saving to memory as it is at buffering shots. It managed to take 20 pictures in 15 seconds with the flash © the best we've ever seen © but required a few minutes to recover before it could do the same again.

Despite the lack of a dedicated screen for camera settings, the 400D is straightforward and quick to use. A pair of new buttons allow you to zoom in and out of captured pictures, and it now stores settings without you having to press the Set button. A new Picture Style option presents various presets for sharpness, contrast, saturation and colour tone, and enables you to save your own, too.

In a compact camera we'd argue that 10 megapixels are more than enough, but with the superior image quality of SLR cameras we welcome the extra detail, as long as the optics and noise performance are up to scratch, too. Happily, the 400D's noise is as low as we've seen from a digital camera, with incredibly smooth photos at ISO 400, dependable results at ISO 800 and acceptable results at ISO 1600. Detail is just as sharp per pixel as that of the 350D, so the extra resolution makes a small but welcome improvement overall. Colours were generally excellent, but the white balance presets were necessary to compensate for artificial lighting. Portraits taken with the flash were actually quite flattering, which is something we can't often say.

With improved image quality and performance over the fantastic 350D and an extremely competitive price, there's little not to love about this camera. It's an obvious choice for enthusiasts upgrading from film or compact digital cameras.

Author: Ben Pitt