Canon EOS 400D

Entry level DSLR with a sophisticated dust cleaning system

The 400D is Canon's entry level DSLR, a compact, lightweight model with plenty of refined shooting features, ease of use to the fore and good image quality - combined with a 10.1-megapixel CMOS sensor and a new anti dust system.

The 400D updates its 350D predecessor with another 2-megapixels worth of resolution on a CMOS sensor featuring an improved micro-lens array. The new sensor gets a special low-pass filter incorporating Canon’s own anti-dust system that shakes the filter to remove any dust particles that might adhere to it.

Other key features include a nine-point AF set up (borrowed straight from the EOS 30D) and a large, bright 230,000-pixel LCD that has a great 160° viewing angle. There’s a much improved menu system (over the 350D) that makes selecting and adjusting quick and easy and, although the camera settings display might look a little overwhelming at first, it’s really quite logical once you’re used to it. The 400D has a stainless steel chassis and engineering grade plastic body parts that make for a lightweight but pleasingly rugged feel.

You're also provided with a full gamut of program, shutter and aperture priority, manual and A-DEP (a neat auto depth of field control setting) modes, a full auto Green mode and six subject program modes all quickly accessed via the top plate mode dial. Shutter speeds run from 30-seconds to 1/4000th second in 1/3rd or 1/2 –stop increments with flash sync at 1/200th second. You get Bulb as well.

White balance allows you to play with the usual options of auto, daylight, shady, tungsten and a custom setting among others. The ISO sensitivity meanwhile varies depending on the modes you’re in. In the Basic Zone shooting modes, (the automatic settings such as portrait for example) it provides an automatic range of between 100 and 400 ISO. In the Creative Zone, (the manual control options) you get the full ISO 100 to 1600 range in one-stop settings.

The 400D uses a 35-zone TTL metering system with the system linked to the AF points in use; partial metering uses 9% of the finder’s central area and centre-weighted average metering - but oddly there’s no spot metering. The camera’s small size is no hindrance in use and the large screen is great to use. On the left of the display are the playback and menu controls; on the right side, the shooting options such as exposure compensation, AF point selection, drive mode, metering mode and then on the four-way controller, the ISO, AF, white balance and Set buttons.

I used the camera’s kit lens for this test, an 18-55mm F3.5 to F5.6 AF optic, which is okay for most general situations, but is quite limiting in terms of focal length and maximum aperture – particularly once you start to get more proficient. It also displayed lots of vignetting; distortion at the wide end, plus there was a hat full of purple fringing I did not expect to get as well!

The viewfinder is nice to use but it’s small and quite gloomy, the information displayed along the bottom is clear and bright though, as is the AF point selection. Image quality is great (bar the kit lens’ performance, as mentioned above) with excellent resolution, metering, low noise and good noise reduction – when needed, and fortunately without removing detail – plus there’s great colour control.