Smile please (Canon EOS 40D)

Member Name: mumsymary

Product:	Canon EOS 40D
Date:	06/02/09 (214 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: takes fair pictures

Disadvantages: heavy

I have owned and used a Canon EOS 40D for just over a year and felt that I knew enough about its foibles to describe the pros and cons to anyone thinking to start using a digital SLR or perhaps upgrading from an older version.

Pros first:

The camera can take RAW images as well as the more universal jpeg. RAW images present you with more of the original scene's detail than jpeg images do. You can capture scenes as solely RAW files, RAW and jpeg, or solely as jpeg.

RAW files allow far more 'tinkering' with the way the image looks and is forgiving of errors like under and over exposure; so if you like processing your images in the computer with a photo-editing software package, RAW provides a better starting point.

Special software to convert RAW files into ones that your photo-editing software requires is included with the camera, but there are proprietary brands that will do it too. Other discs include a manual and users guide and various bits to connect you to photosharing facilities. If you buy a new camera as a kit with lenses, you get all you need to start making images.

The camera is a good fit to the adult hand (small point and shoot compacts are harder to grip.) Very small hands might struggle to grip right around the 40D camera body, but my 5 year old grandson can do so adequately.

The various buttons, dials and the joystick are (mostly) positioned where they can be reached whilst looking through the viewfinder.

The reaction of the camera to you pressing the shutter release button is near instantaneous. Probably you have seen a great moment through a point and shoot, only to wait for it to fire off a shot after the moment has passed.

The screen on the rear of the camera is large and brighter than most contemporary cameras and can be used to compose and shoot images (in live view). However, the camera is intended for use through the optical viewfinder, which prevents the annoying problem of sunlight making the screen hard to see. Using liveview the camera can be used through a pc, viewing the scene on the computer monitor and shooting the images via the keyboard.

The large viewfinder comes into its own when using playback to check your images.
You can zoom in on a captured image to check the focus and detail to an extremely fine degree.
Exposure can be checked by displaying a histogram showing the range of brightness levels of the image.

Autofocus is fast and achieved through any one of 9 focus points dotted about the viewfinder. Selecting the appropriate focus point allows great flexibility in composing a shot.

The camera has an easy to navigate menu with many options. There are 12 picture shooting modes (plus three customisable modes).
There are a number of options that can be custom set, to allow quick access to functions you use most frequently.

The options allow you to take control and achieve pictures where point and shoot cameras would fail. The EOS 40D allows you to get better exposed and higher resolution pictures, more often than a point and shoot camera would.

Interchangeable lenses allow you to take massive, epic scale landscapes and close up shots of minute details, as well as more commonplace shots of the family.

The battery is simple and quick to recharge and has always outperformed my wife's compact in terms of the number of shots achieved between recharges, by a factor of 3 to 4 times.

There is a built in flash and additional (more powerful and more controllable) flash guns can be added.



Cons:
The camera body alone costs £600+. Lenses are purchased separately and also cost a lot more than you might think.

The lens most often offered as part of the bundled 'body and zoom lens' kit is not particularly good compared with alternative lenses. You will do better to haggle over an upgrade to a higher quality lens (more worthy of the sensor in the body) for a little extra cost.

RAW images are larger than jpeg images so you need more storage space on your flash card and in your computer. Converting RAW images to high quality finished prints is more time consuming than using jpegs (because jpegs limit your options much more).

The quality of images you can achieve with the 40D is better than most compact cameras and than many other digital slr cameras. But the sensor is not as big as in some 'professional' grade cameras; so there is less resolution than these 'pro' bodies provide.

It might seem odd, but point and shoot compact cameras are set up to take family portraits and the software in them does this very well, given bright light and no more than a few metres between subject and camera. The EOS 40D will do no better without greater effort on the photographers part. The EOS 40D does not have face recognition technology, so you have to make the decision where to focus if the picture contains a face.

Like so many digital cameras the rear screen is hard to see in very bright light; though you can purchase an accessory to shade the screen and improve visibility.

The camera is heavy and the larger interchangeable lenses are heavy too - together making for a very heavy camera/lens combination.

The number of different options for picture creation could be bewildering at first and could lead to disappointment, or to the new user simply sticking to a single mode of use. You have to spend some time learning to use the best choices for each situation, but if you put in the time and thought required, your pictures will benefit.

There is no capability for taking video.


Conclusions:
Overall this is a better camera in terms of its versatility and resolution than virtually all 'point and shoot' compact cameras. However, it is also more expensive, bulkier and much, much heavier than them. If you are almost always taking shots of the family posing in bright light; you don't need to buy a 40D. If you hate post-processing in the computer, you might not want to pay extra for features that can give better photos but only after extra time at the pc. If the large menu and variety of choice available seems daunting, and you fear you might just shoot in automatic mode, it might not be the camera for you.

However, after a year of use, I would never be able to go back to point and shoot compacts. I enjoy giving more thought to picture creation when I have time and using the auto functions when I don't. I am getting more pictures that I want to keep and print these days ( the RAW image capture helps!). Possibly, a smaller percentage of my shots are perfectly exposed and focussed, but those that are, more than make up for the limited range of shots I had from compacts previously. I have discovered the joy of wide angle lenses and landscape photography that reflects the true beauty of the scene (can you recall explaining to your friends, when you show your compact images; that this or that feature in a holiday scene looked bigger, closer or different in some way than it looks in the picture?). Moreover, I now delight in macro (very close up) photography. The tiny world of insects in my own garden has taken on a greater thrill than any number of t.v. programmes about big cats. But it is heavy.

Summary: A digital camera

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