Canon PowerShot SD40 First Impressions Review

Canon supplies their own ZoomBrowser EX software with this camera, which does a creditable job of organizing and editing images. It’s a Windows-only program, though; Mac users will have to find their own solution. Also included is the PhotoStitch 3.1 panorama creation software, which runs on both Windows and Mac, and TWAIN drivers for importing images directly from the camera into Photoshop or similar programs.

No ports are present on the Canon PowerShot SD40 camera itself; all of the connections are made through the camera station, which includes connections for power, for USB 2.0 and for AV outputs. While this works well at home (as you can route the cable out of the way), it’s a bit of a pain on the road; you have to take both the cables and the camera station with you. However, it is worth remembering that you don’t need the USB port to read images into a laptop computer; you can use an SD card reader instead.

As well as DPOF and PictBridge support (for flagging images for later printing and connecting directly to a PictBridge printer) the SD40 can connect to the Canon Selphy and Pixma printer ranges. The Selphy CP & ES printers can also print out stills from movie files.

 

The battery in the SD40 is a small, lithium-ion rechargeable model. It is automatically recharged whenever the camera is inserted into the docking station. Canon claims a battery life of around 190 shots. We were unable to verify this figure, but this number isn’t worth boasting about.

 

A 16 MB SD card is included with the camera, which is enough to snap only four pictures at the top resolution. The Canon PowerShot SD40 can accept MMC, SD or SDHC cards up to 4 GB.

Facial Recognition – The new Digic III image processor includes facial recognition, where the camera tries to pick out faces from the image. As well as using this to try and pick the focus point, the SD40 uses this for metering, setting the exposure and flash power to try and correctly expose the face.