Canon EOS 400D review

Features
For better -- or sometimes worse -- the feature set of the Canon EOS 400D remains roughly the same as the 350D's. The kit version comes with the f/3.5-to-f/5.6, 18mm-to-55mm EF-S lens (29mm-to-88mm equivalent, thanks to the 400D's 1.6x conversion factor), which is a trifle too slow for frequent indoor users.

Most amateurs will find all the essentials -- a handful of manual, semi-manual and automatic exposure modes, user-selectable nine-point autofocus and AI Servo autofocus for moving subjects and simultaneous raw-plus-JPEG capture.

To keep up with the camera Joneses, the CMOS chip in the 400D is now self-cleaning. As with many other dSLRs, the low-pass filter layer vibrates when the camera powers on and off in order to shake dust away from the sensor. There's also an anti-static coating on the filter to repel dust. Furthermore, a piece of adhesive surrounding the sensor is designed to grab dust, keeping it from flying around inside the camera chassis. In addition to dust control, Canon has split the low-pass filter into two parts, effectively placing whatever dust does settle beyond the range of focus.

Unfortunately, like the 350D, the 400D lacks a spot meter -- it supplies only evaluative, centre-weighted average and partial centre-weighted metering. There is simply no substitute for a spot in tricky lighting situations. In fact, we couldn't avoid severe underexposures of a backlit subject with the available metering tools, which is inexcusable for a camera of this class.
 

 

Simply metering on the subject's face should have solved this shot's exposure problem, but the partial metering didn't work (left). A spot meter probably would have been able to handle it. Instead, we had to boost the exposure value of the entire scene by jumping to ISO 400 (right)

 
Performance
Though the CMOS imager used by the 400D is the same physical size as the version in the 350D, Canon has crammed more pixels into the space to bump up the resolution, and has improved the design of the microlenses that sit atop each photosite -- the microlenses gather indirect light and focus it back on the sensor -- as well as increasing the size of the photosites themselves. While still relatively low for its class, the 400D's measured and visible image noise was significantly worse than that of the CCD-based Nikon D80 for any given ISO speed.

In general, the 400D's measured also speed fell short of the D80's. Our experience bears that out -- though it felt as if it were fast and responsive, we frequently found the shot was captured just a fraction of a second too late. Keep in mind that it takes a while to adjust to the pace of a camera and to get a feel for its shooting rhythm -- and we've been shooting with faster pro models such as the Canon EOS 30D and Olympus E-1 -- and it's fast enough so that, in time, the number of missed shots would have dropped.