Canon EOS 40D

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The piece de resistance on the Canon EOS 40D's new suite of features has to be its 3-inch LCD with Live View capability. Like a compact digital camera, Live View allows framing using the LCD monitor. This enables the photographer to frame low-level shots without repositioning his head to the height level of the viewfinder. It's also good for shooting overhead shots without having to guess what will appear in the resulting photo as he can see his subject in the frame.

Though fast, the Canon's 6.5fps was just slightly too slow to capture this softball player's action in greater detail, but focus was spot on in spite of distracting elements in the frame.

However, there is a significant caveat: The EOS 40D cannot autofocus in Live View. The photographer must set the lens to manual and focus by hand. This is because dSLR autofocus systems work by judging focus from the image passing through the viewfinder's line of sight, and not the Live View sensor's line of sight.

In dSLR cameras that claim the ability to autofocus in Live View (like Olympus models), what actually happens is that the mirror drops down for a short moment. This temporarily halts Live View and diverts the light through to the viewfinder for a focus lock, before the mirror flips back up to allow light to pass through to the Live View sensor to display the focused image.

While this seems simple in theory, it takes time for this process to complete And if the photographer moves during the focusing, the focus will be lost, or worse, a poorly focused photo will result.

A workaround to get autofocus in Live View is via a custom function on the EOS 40D. Pressing the camera's AF-On button during Live View will cause the mirror to drop down for normal focusing to be done; and once the photographer stops pressing the AF-On button, Live View resumes with the focused image.

The EOS 30D introduced the Picture Style feature that optimized the camera's sharpening, contrast, color saturation and tone settings into six combinations. These combinations--standard, portrait, landscape, neutral, faithful and monochrome--are used to optimize the camera for different subjects and simulates the use of old-school color-biased film.

Each combination can be reconfigured and there are three additional user-defined combinations that can be saved to memory. Although this feature is probably good for those who shoot different subjects and know the results of the parameter changes intimately, casual shooters will probably use it less for fear of negatively affecting the intended photo.

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