Canon EOS 400D review

Continuous-shooting performance has been tweaked a bit. Though the speed remains the same as in the 350D, Canon rates the 400D to shoot as many as 27 frames of JPEG or 10 frames of raw before the camera hits a bottleneck and slows. It fared slightly better in our testing, though the 7-second lag before you can continue shooting can be frustrating. The 400D uses Canon's Digic II chipset rather than the newer Digic III, and we wonder if the company might have been able to eke out better performance and noise suppression with the latter.

(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Raw shot-to-shot time

Time to first shot

Shutter lag (dim light)

Shutter lag (typical)

Canon EOS 30D

0.4 

0.3 

0.6 

0.4 

Canon EOS 400D

0.6 

0.3 

1.1 

0.4 

Sony Alpha DSLR-A100

0.5 

1 

1.6 

0.4 

Nikon D80

0.3 

0.1 

0.9 

0.5 

Olympus Evolt E-330

0.8 

1.7 

0.7 

0.5 

 
We did most of our testing with the kit lens. We love how small and lightweight it is, but still find it too slow -- the maximum aperture of f/3.5 simply doesn't let in enough light and doesn't allow for a shallow enough depth of field for our purposes. Furthermore, there's far more chromatic aberration -- in this case, purple fringing -- than we're used to seeing in a dSLR. Even catchlights in eyes from the add-on flash had fringing. If you have the money, we'd recommend the EF-S 17mm-to-55mm f/2.8 IS USM instead. We didn't get a chance to try it with the 400D, but it should be lightweight enough not to overpower the body and fast enough to provide more exposure latitude. It also has the advantage of optical image stabilisation and a quieter motor.

Image quality
Despite our few complaints, the Canon EOS 400D still shoots some nice photos, with good colour rendition, broad dynamic range (when there's sufficient illumination) and accurate automatic white balance. Shots taken at ISO 100 and ISO 200 were very clean, but beyond that, the photos couldn't take much retouching without drawing attention to the noise.  

Though many of our shots weren't quite as sharply focused as we expected from the 400D's AF system, a few, such as this one, stood up well to 280x400mm printing on an Epson Stylus Photo R2400

 
Canon is not planning to do away with the 350D, and the presence of a new model doesn't make that great model obsolete. If you don't change lenses that often, don't mind the smaller LCD, don't need the slight bump in continuous-shooting speed and don't need the higher resolution, then you don't really need to pay extra for the Canon EOS 400D. Furthermore, if you don't yet have an investment in any particular manufacturer's lens system and want this year's best model for less than £800, you might consider the Nikon D80.

Additional editing by Elizabeth Griffin