dansumption
New Member
I got my 40D last Thursday (e19896 has just popped round to drool over it - expect photos here soon), and I absolutely love it. I upgraded from a 20D, which itself is a wonderful camera, but lots of little (and not so little) things really make the difference for me.
Most immediately obvious is the huuuuge 3" display - this makes it much easier to confidently review and delete photos while on the go (the 20D's 1.8" screen looks pathetic by comparison).
Not part of the specs that Canon sells the camera on, but also important to me, is the shutter sound. It's a lot quieter and somehow less harsh than the 20D's sound. Perfect for stealth photography, accoustic concerts, etc.
ISO display on the top LCD and in the viewfinder is a real bonus, and having ISO adjustable by 1/3rd of a stop is much more useful than I had expected it to be. Automatic ISO adjustment seems a bit of a gimmick that I can't really see myself using much.
The menu screens are much more intuitively organised than the 20D's single long menu, and there's even a user-customisable menu, where you can put all of the settings that you change frequently. Added to this are three user-customisable camera modes - something I have long been begging for - I haven't got to grips with how to set them up yet (because my manual's in Chinese), but I can see this being the single most useful improvement in this camera, because it means that when I'm out shooting at night I can quickly switch between flash and non-flash modes without having to dial in big changes to the shutter speed, aperture and ISO.
Burst mode runs noticeably faster and longer than on the 20D: for me, this meant lots more wonderful photos of the "confetti moment" at the wedding I photographed last Friday. The downside is it will mean lots more 10Mb+ files clogging up my hard disk
Subjectively it seems that high ISO performance is a little cleaner, and auto-focus in the dark a little more reliable, but I'm not really the sort of person who runs side-by-side tests, so I couldn't say for sure.
The very different button layout from the 20D has been a bit of a challenge to my muscle-memory, but after one long wedding day and night, shooting 600-odd photos, I'm getting used to the new design.
The larger LCD display means that exposure settings are always displayed above the photo, which I find very handy, and the four different display modes contain a wealth of useful information (although again muscle-memory was only used to three display screens, so this kept throwing me), although I'm a bit peeved that to turn the flashing highlight alert on and off you have to edit a menu setting, whereas on the 20D one info screen had highlight alert and another didn't.
The addition of picture styles is really, really annoying - I'm not quite sure why anyone would want to use these, and the button that controls them is just sitting there waiting to be knocked by accident. I've already had one photo come out in monochrome by accident.
Liveview also seems like a bit of a gimmick, although I can see some occasions where it would come in handy. I haven't encountered any yet though, so haven't tried it out (oh yeah, and it's another thing where I need a bit more than my Chinese manual to work out what to do).
The auto-focus on button ought to be really useful, but I need to learn to adapt my way of photography to properly take advantage of it. I think this may take me a month or two.
Lots of other little improvements, all add up to make a package which I absolutely love and can't wait to make more use of. My only problem: Adobe haven't yet released a 40D RAW plugin for Lightroom, and the Canon DPP software supplied is all greek to me, so it's taking me a lot longer to actually process the hundreds of photos I'm ending up with.
Most immediately obvious is the huuuuge 3" display - this makes it much easier to confidently review and delete photos while on the go (the 20D's 1.8" screen looks pathetic by comparison).
Not part of the specs that Canon sells the camera on, but also important to me, is the shutter sound. It's a lot quieter and somehow less harsh than the 20D's sound. Perfect for stealth photography, accoustic concerts, etc.
ISO display on the top LCD and in the viewfinder is a real bonus, and having ISO adjustable by 1/3rd of a stop is much more useful than I had expected it to be. Automatic ISO adjustment seems a bit of a gimmick that I can't really see myself using much.
The menu screens are much more intuitively organised than the 20D's single long menu, and there's even a user-customisable menu, where you can put all of the settings that you change frequently. Added to this are three user-customisable camera modes - something I have long been begging for - I haven't got to grips with how to set them up yet (because my manual's in Chinese), but I can see this being the single most useful improvement in this camera, because it means that when I'm out shooting at night I can quickly switch between flash and non-flash modes without having to dial in big changes to the shutter speed, aperture and ISO.
Burst mode runs noticeably faster and longer than on the 20D: for me, this meant lots more wonderful photos of the "confetti moment" at the wedding I photographed last Friday. The downside is it will mean lots more 10Mb+ files clogging up my hard disk
Subjectively it seems that high ISO performance is a little cleaner, and auto-focus in the dark a little more reliable, but I'm not really the sort of person who runs side-by-side tests, so I couldn't say for sure.
The very different button layout from the 20D has been a bit of a challenge to my muscle-memory, but after one long wedding day and night, shooting 600-odd photos, I'm getting used to the new design.
The larger LCD display means that exposure settings are always displayed above the photo, which I find very handy, and the four different display modes contain a wealth of useful information (although again muscle-memory was only used to three display screens, so this kept throwing me), although I'm a bit peeved that to turn the flashing highlight alert on and off you have to edit a menu setting, whereas on the 20D one info screen had highlight alert and another didn't.
The addition of picture styles is really, really annoying - I'm not quite sure why anyone would want to use these, and the button that controls them is just sitting there waiting to be knocked by accident. I've already had one photo come out in monochrome by accident.
Liveview also seems like a bit of a gimmick, although I can see some occasions where it would come in handy. I haven't encountered any yet though, so haven't tried it out (oh yeah, and it's another thing where I need a bit more than my Chinese manual to work out what to do).
The auto-focus on button ought to be really useful, but I need to learn to adapt my way of photography to properly take advantage of it. I think this may take me a month or two.
Lots of other little improvements, all add up to make a package which I absolutely love and can't wait to make more use of. My only problem: Adobe haven't yet released a 40D RAW plugin for Lightroom, and the Canon DPP software supplied is all greek to me, so it's taking me a lot longer to actually process the hundreds of photos I'm ending up with.
