Canon PowerShot SD40 First Impressions Review

Although I’d be surprised if many people will use it, the SD40 offers a full manual mode, where you can manually set the shutter speed and aperture. In full manual mode, you adjust the aperture, then hold down the exposure compensation button to adjust the shutter speed. It’s a far from ideal system, but it works and is adequate for occasional use.

Auto Focus – The auto focus of the SD40 seems to be snappy and responsive, quickly finding the right focus spot. We weren’t able to do much testing on the focus system in different lighting conditions, but it seemed to work adequately in the odd lighting of the Photokina convention center. It uses a 9-point focus system, with three focus modes: AiAF (where the camera picks the point to focus on), single point AF and facial recognition. The last mode is new to Canon digital cameras and is a hardware-based program that runs from the image processor. The camera picks faces out of the frame and automatically focuses on them. This feature seemed to work in our limited tests, but we’ll have to wait until we get a closer look at this to really determine how effective it is.

Manual Focus – No manual focus mode is offered on the Canon PowerShot SD40. But most users won’t miss it.

Exposure compensation of two stops up and down is available by using the exposure compensation button, and this can be adjusted in one third of a stop increments.

As well as the standard auto mode, seven white balance presets are present: Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Florescent H, Underwater and Custom. The latter uses a white card (or other white object) to try and figure out what is truly white under the current lighting. That’s all pretty standard stuff, but it is a little frustrating not to see the ability to store more than one custom white balance setting.

ISO

Although the SD40 uses the same image sensor as other PowerShot cameras, Canon claims that the new Digic III processor allows it to mitigate the effects of noise, which means that the maximum ISO can go up to 1600. Manual settings are available for the following ISO ratings: 80, 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1600. Canon also has two automatic ISO modes: a standard Auto and a High ISO Auto mode for low light conditions.

 

The shutter speed range is from 15 seconds to 1/1600th of a second. Shutter speeds above 1 second are available only by enabling the long shutter speed mode.

 

The aperture range of the 2.4x lens is from f/3.2 to f/5.4. That’s a pretty short range that won’t provide much in the way of depth of field, but that’s not unusual in point-and-shoot cameras with tiny lenses.