Canon EOS 400D

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 F3.5-to-F5.6, 18mm-to-55mm EF-S lens (28.8mm-to-88mm equivalent, thanks to the 400D's 1.6x conversion factor), which is a trifle too slow for frequent indoor shooters like me.

Most amateurs will find all the essentials: A handful of manual, semimanual, 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. Similarly to many other dSLRs, the low-pass filter layer vibrates when the camera powers off or on in order to shake dust away from the sensor; plus, there's an antistatic coating on the filter that repels dust. Furthermore, a bit of adhesive surrounding the sensor is designed to grab the 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 EOS 350D, the 400D lacks a spot meter; it supplies only evaluative, center-weighted average, and partial center-weighted metering. There is simply no substitute for a spot in tricky lighting situations. In fact, I 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, I had to boost the exposure value of the entire scene by jumping to ISO 400 (right).

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