Canon DC40 Camcorder Review

Still Features (8.25)
The Canon DC40 captures stills to MiniSD and DVD. No MiniSD card comes included, and even now, eight months after Canon released their first camcorders with MiniSD, many stores do not carry the cards, and many card readers don’t accept them. Many MiniSD cards come with MiniSD-to-SD converters, but that’s one more thing to pack and to lose. MiniSD prices are generally less expensive, on the other hand, than those of their larger SD card siblings.

Stills can be captured in four sizes, 2304 x 1736, 1632 x 1224, 1280 x 960, and 640 x 480. Each has three quality options, Normal, Fine, and Superfine. The camcorder does not take 16:9 stills.

The Function menu has many of the same options as in video mode. White balance operation is the same. The image effects are the same – Vivid, Neutral, Low Sharpening, Soft Skin Detail, and Custom. You can also use the same Auto Slow Shutter, Program AE modes, Shutter Priority mode, and Aperture Priority mode. The features that exist for still mode alone are pretty good for a camcorder.

There are multiple methods for auto focus and exposure. Focus Priority won’t let you take a photo until it finds a focus; if focus is difficult or you’re trying to speed up shutter lag, you may want to turn this mode off. There are three metering methods: the Evaluative setting considers the lighting of the entire frame; the Center Weight Average, as it sounds, provides more weight towards the center of the frame; and the Spot setting creates a small target in the center of the frame for the finest possible metering control.

There is also a neutral density (ND) filter, which darkens the picture equally throughout the frame, allowing you to open up the aperture more and get a shallower depth of field. For all these features, you do lose image stabilization and digital zoom.

The DC40 also gives you options for continuous shooting. A detailed table in the manual gives you all the speeds for continuous shooting, with and without the flash, in all the different resolutions. In its highest quality, 2304 x 1736, you can shoot 2.1 frames per second and take up to 10 images total. There is also an Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) feature, which takes three stills in rapid succession, one at the chosen setting, then one at a -1/2 EV step down and one at a +1/2 step up.

The list of still features continues. An auto focus assist lamp is available to help with focus. There is also a flash, which has an external button on the upper left side (it doubles as the VCR rewind button). The flash can be set to automatic, force on, red-eye reduction, and off.

Still Resolution (11.7)
The stills of the DC40 were tested for their resolution by shooting a standard ISO12233 resolution chart and running those stills through Imatest imaging software. In total, the camcorder produced an approximate resolution of 1170000.8.

The chart below shows how the DC40 stood up to comparable camcorders.

Still Performance (7.0)
The DC40’s stills did not have the color balance of its video. Many colors looked washed out, particularly the greens, which appeared overly yellow. The picture had a fair amount of fine grain noise, especially the black areas. It also showed instances of halos along areas of high contrast. For 4MP, it’s a sharp image, but this is not much of a substitute for a dedicated still camera.

The DC40 did, however, far exceed the DC10 stills, which had even less color (it was truly a flat, washed out image) and far more noise. The DC10 also had trouble making out small detail, and Moiré patterns appeared.

The Sony DVD405 produced rather muddy looking stills, but had more anti-aliasing, which made for smoother, better looking curves and diagonals. Finally, the Panasonic VDR-D300 produced a much noisier image. It failed to produce detail in the blacks and created much stronger halos around areas of contrast.

Overall, while the DC40 still ranked well against the competition, it is not a great stand-in for a point and shoot camera.