I have played with my new 40D for a few days now since I bought it on Sunday, so it’s time to write about some of my initial impression on this new camera.

1. The viewfinder view is bright and is much bigger than the 20D/30D. Definitely a nice upgrade. It’s great to finally have ISO visible in the viewfinder at all times.

2. The Canon 20D makes a really loud shutter/mirror noise. The 40D is much quieter, the sound is very muted. If the 20D sounds like a gun, the 40D sounds like a 20D with a silencer on.

3. Autofoucs seemed faster especially under low light situation. Probably because all the 9 focus pints are now cross-type, all the focus sensors are much more sensitive than on the Canon 20D/30D. Previously, on the 20D, the peripheral sensors hunt a lot under low light situation, sometimes almost impossible to lock on a focus. On the 40D now, the peripheral sensors all locked focus instantly just like the centre focus point.

4. The 3″ LCD is positively a huge improvement over the tiny 1.8″ LCD on the 20D. It is probably not such a bit improvement over the 2.5″ LCD on the 30D though. Without comparing the high resolution 3″ LCD on Nikon D3 and D300, which I have not seen and are not on sale yet, I would just say the 3″ LCD on the 40D is bright and clear with good viewing angle.

5. The menu structure has changed

I took a similar shot with my new 40D and my old 20D at ISO 1600. I scaled the shots to 50% and cropped them for comparison here. The first shot is from 40D and the 2nd shot is from 20D.

A lot of people are interested in high ISO performance of the new 40D. I shot a few ISO1600 shots today. You can see them below. All these shots were processed straight from RAW file without any adjustmetn in Digital Photo Professional(DPP). The TIF files convert with DPP were then exported to Photoshop CS3. Only resizing and slight sharpening were done in Photoshop. No other image adjustment were made.