Attractive, functional design; solid build quality; very decent daytime and surprisingly solid low-light video quality; broad set of semimanual photo and video controls
Small LCD; uses miniSD cards rather than standard SD; blinding video light; no S-Video input for converting analogue video to DVDs
The Canon DC40 definitely deserves a spot on your short list of DVD camcorders
7.7 Very good
Reviewed by Lori Grunin
With its broad, useful feature set, zippy shooting performance, attractive design and good video quality, the Canon DC40 cements a place among the best of the DVD camcorders. Of course, it suffers from many of the same flaws as its competitors -- such as sluggish disc activity -- but if your heart is set on recording direct to DVD, it's definitely worth a look. If. however, your idea of a good time is hitting the Easy button and pointing the camera, you'd best consider the Sony DCR-DVD405 or the DCR-DVD505 as well.
Design
There's not a lot you can do to make a DVD camcorder attractive. There are only so many ways to combine the basic geometries of a tubular optical system, an 80mm circular DVD disc and a rectangular LCD screen -- and for obvious reasons, you've got to rule out the combinations that require thumbs on the back of your hand or eyes in your neck. Canon does its best to make you forget that its DC40 is composed of the same old elements.
For starters, its brushed-plastic chassis, in two-tone metallic champagne and brown, provides a nicely upscale look and feel. Despite the plastic, the DC40 also feels quite solidly made, in part due to its 540g heft. A rubberised strip on top of the drive gives your fingers a comfortable edge to grip, and in that position, your right forefinger rests naturally on the zoom switch and within reach of the photo shutter button, while your thumb falls on the record button.
If you've been considering a camcorder with an Easy button, the DC40 isn't for you -- it has quite a few external controls for a consumer model. The on/off/play slider, next to the record button, takes a bit of a reach for your right thumb. Given how infrequently you need that control during shooting, its placement works, you also have to shift your hand slightly to operate the camera/camcorder switch. The menu and function buttons, which you will need to access more frequently, require either some right-hand contortion or left-handed activation -- since the navigation joystick sits on the left side of the camcorder, it means shifting your left hand back and forth repeatedly. It's not a bad design, but it could be fine-tuned.
The joystick provides quick access to exposure settings -- exposure compensation, shutter speed or aperture, depending upon which mode you're in -- as well as manual focus. Though it quickly gets you in the neighbourhood when manually focusing, it's very hard to manipulate for fine-tuning.
Canon has put playback controls, plus on/off buttons for the flash and video light, on the outside of the camcorder and the battery on the inside under the LCD. That's where they all belong, but all too frequently they're found elsewhere.
Because of the smallish 69mm (2.7-inch) LCD, the DC40's menu icons can be difficult to distinguish. Unfortunately, the viewfinder is also tiny and inflexible, so it's not much of an alternative. You should try it yourself before purchasing if you're a senior or you wear glasses.
Features
Like Sony, Canon's approach to the high-end DVD camcorder involves plenty of features. But while Sony goes the home-cinema route, tossing in extras such as 5.1 surround recording, Canon emphasises manual controls and photo options. We find the latter approach much more compelling.
Though the Canon DC40 offers a modest 10x zoom lens, it provides a wide f/1.8-to-f/3.0 aperture and can accept 37mm add-on lenses. Video shot in 16:9 aspect ratio uses just less than 3 megapixels, 4:3 uses about 3.5 megapixels, while stills take a full 4-megapixel shot. Like all of its competitors, the camcorder can fit 20 minutes of the highest-quality video on a single-sided DVD. Canon's camcorder offerings support 80mm DVD-R and DVD-RW discs and include Roxio MyDVD in the box.
The DC40 features aperture- and shutter-priority exposure modes and a large handful of scene and white-balance presets that all work in both still and video modes. On top of that there's a smattering of digital image and video effects. The DC40 also offers a lot of nice touches, including a variable zoom rate plus three constant zoom-rate choices, a display overlay of a horizon line (for those of us who can't keep it level), a built-in neutral density filter and a wind filter. The two low-light modes, Night and Super Night, simply drop the shutter speed and add the video light, respectively.
There are a few controls that we wish were available for both videos and stills, however. For instance, photo-only options such as selectable metering modes -- you have a choice of evaluative, spot and centre-weighted -- would come in handy for videos. And video-only options, most notably 16:9 operation and image stabilisation, would be great for stills. Since the DC40 uses electronic image stabilisation, you do sacrifice a bit of your 16:9 frame when it's active. But at least the camcorder delivers a true widescreen view, rather than letterboxed 4:3.
Performance
The Canon DC40 performs pretty well for its class, but remember that DVD camcorders are still in the remedial class when it comes to recording lag. With a pre-initialised blank disc, start-up is virtually instantaneous, and shutdown takes a few seconds. Initialising is another story. The camcorder requires about 15 seconds just to ascertain that a DVD-RW needs initialisation and another 35 seconds to format for DVD-VR (rewritable) or 20 seconds for DVD-R. A partly filled DVD-R requires almost half a minute before the camcorder is ready to record. Once you're ready to go, you'll always have a couple of seconds of lag between pressing record/stop and the action occurring.
Aside from its media-related performance, however, the DC40 operates smoothly and quickly. It adjusts focus rapidly when zooming and panning, for both high- and low-contrast subjects, and swiftly adapts to changes in subject exposure. The zoom switch is quite responsive -- in variable-zoom mode the lens can go from wide to tele in a snap. The constant-rate zoom presets run at slow, slower and unbearably slow, but we guess that's where you need them the most. The electronic image stabilisation keeps the video steady through minor shakes.
Canon positioned the DC40's microphone in the front of the camcorder, below the lens. As such, it doesn't pick up the 'thock' sound of the zoom switch being released or the profane utterances of the frustrated videographer. That said, the audio quality is just acceptable -- we miss the level controls that were available on the soon-to-be-defunct Optura models.
The 69mm LCD is small and quite coarse but remains usable in bright sunlight and moderately dim environments.
Image quality
When played back in a relatively new DVD player, the Canon DC40's best-quality video looks extremely good -- sharp and saturated, with accurate white balance and exposure. As long as you haven't panned or zoomed too fast, there are few motion artefacts. When we played our video on a several-year-old, basic DVD player though, it randomly skipped frames. Though it's possibly the fault of the player and its inability to fluently read DVD-R, you should keep this experience in mind when you send discs to your grandparents.
Low-light video quality came as a pleasant surprise. Yes, it's grainy, but not offensively so, and it retains enough colour to look realistic. The video light provides strong illumination as far as about 2m away, but if you point it at a person, they'll be seeing spots for days.
Still photos display the same characteristics that make the video appealing -- good white balance, exposure and saturation -- but without the image stabilisation, you have to manually set the shutter speed high in order to get sharp pictures. In Auto mode on a bright day, we couldn't snap one sharp enough to print.
Additional editing by Kate Macefield
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