Canon DC40 review

The DC40 features aperture- and shutter-priority exposure modes and a large handful of scene and white-balance presets that all work in both still and video modes. On top of that there's a smattering of digital image and video effects. The DC40 also offers a lot of nice touches, including a variable zoom rate plus three constant zoom-rate choices, a display overlay of a horizon line (for those of us who can't keep it level), a built-in neutral density filter and a wind filter. The two low-light modes, Night and Super Night, simply drop the shutter speed and add the video light, respectively.

There are a few controls that we wish were available for both videos and stills, however. For instance, photo-only options such as selectable metering modes -- you have a choice of evaluative, spot and centre-weighted -- would come in handy for videos. And video-only options, most notably 16:9 operation and image stabilisation, would be great for stills. Since the DC40 uses electronic image stabilisation, you do sacrifice a bit of your 16:9 frame when it's active. But at least the camcorder delivers a true widescreen view, rather than letterboxed 4:3.

Performance
The Canon DC40 performs pretty well for its class, but remember that DVD camcorders are still in the remedial class when it comes to recording lag. With a pre-initialised blank disc, start-up is virtually instantaneous, and shutdown takes a few seconds. Initialising is another story. The camcorder requires about 15 seconds just to ascertain that a DVD-RW needs initialisation and another 35 seconds to format for DVD-VR (rewritable) or 20 seconds for DVD-R. A partly filled DVD-R requires almost half a minute before the camcorder is ready to record. Once you're ready to go, you'll always have a couple of seconds of lag between pressing record/stop and the action occurring.

Aside from its media-related performance, however, the DC40 operates smoothly and quickly. It adjusts focus rapidly when zooming and panning, for both high- and low-contrast subjects, and swiftly adapts to changes in subject exposure. The zoom switch is quite responsive -- in variable-zoom mode the lens can go from wide to tele in a snap. The constant-rate zoom presets run at slow, slower and unbearably slow, but we guess that's where you need them the most. The electronic image stabilisation keeps the video steady through minor shakes.

Canon positioned the DC40's microphone in the front of the camcorder, below the lens. As such, it doesn't pick up the 'thock' sound of the zoom switch being released or the profane utterances of the frustrated videographer. That said, the audio quality is just acceptable -- we miss the level controls that were available on the soon-to-be-defunct Optura models.

The 69mm LCD is small and quite coarse but remains usable in bright sunlight and moderately dim environments.

Image quality
When played back in a relatively new DVD player, the Canon DC40's best-quality video looks extremely good -- sharp and saturated, with accurate white balance and exposure. As long as you haven't panned or zoomed too fast, there are few motion artefacts. When we played our video on a several-year-old, basic DVD player though, it randomly skipped frames. Though it's possibly the fault of the player and its inability to fluently read DVD-R, you should keep this experience in mind when you send discs to your grandparents.

Low-light video quality came as a pleasant surprise. Yes, it's grainy, but not offensively so, and it retains enough colour to look realistic. The video light provides strong illumination as far as about 2m away, but if you point it at a person, they'll be seeing spots for days.

Still photos display the same characteristics that make the video appealing -- good white balance, exposure and saturation -- but without the image stabilisation, you have to manually set the shutter speed high in order to get sharp pictures. In Auto mode on a bright day, we couldn't snap one sharp enough to print.

Additional editing by Kate Macefield