Canon Digital IXUS 40 review

Generally stellar performance figures, great battery life, and an ultracompact design will score points for the Canon Digital IXUS 40 with the point-and-shoot crowd, but its lack of manual controls, limited selection of scene modes, and anaemic flash put a crimp in the versatility of this camera. Mini-movie fans will love the ability to shoot continuous high-quality clips limited only by memory card capacity, as well as the unusual 60-frames-per-second slow-motion mode.

Design
Canon shrank the dimensions of the 156g Digital IXUS 40 down to an ultraslim 86 by 53 by 21mm package that can slip into any pocket. The camera is made even more easily pocketable by its reduced number of protrusions, starting with the hand-strap lug, which is now recessed into the body. The camera's exterior is all metal, except for plastic doors covering the battery/SD memory card slots and A/V and USB ports.

While you can operate the Digital IXUS 40 with one hand, a two-handed grip makes it easier to work the zoom lever, which is concentric with the top-mounted shutter-release button. A recessed on/off button and a green power LED are the only other adornments on the top surface. The major controls are concentrated on the right side of the back panel, which is dominated by a brightness-adjustable 51mm LCD viewfinder. A three-way sliding switch lets you select recording, movie mode, or playback, and three other buttons provide access to the three-page menu system (with shooting, setup, and customisation options), display options (status info, no info, and monitor off), and print/share features.

As with other point-and-shoot Canons, most shooting settings are taken care of by the four-way cursor pad with embedded OK/Function button. For example, pressing the Up button switches between spot, centre-weighted, and evaluative metering; Down selects single-shot mode, burst mode, or the self-timer. The left key cycles through Normal, Landscape, and Macro focus modes, while the right button selects a flash mode.

The pad's centre button invokes menus for choosing a scene mode; adjusting exposure compensation to ±2EV in 1/3-stop increments; selecting white balance, ISO, resolution, and JPEG compression ratio; and applying a unexceptional number of special effects that include vivid colour, low sharpening, sepia, and black-and-white.

Features
The Digital IXUS 40's modest feature set includes most of the basics, starting with a 35mm-to-115mm 3x zoom lens (35mm-film-camera equivalent) with a nine-point autofocus system that's accurate down to 1.2 inches in macro mode. Only six scene modes are available, which is a modest selection in the current market. However, they're generally useful and include a Digital Macro option that fills the frame with the centre of the image to provide the equivalent of digital zoom in close-up mode. Other scene modes include Portrait, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets, Indoor, and Underwater, which you can use with an optional marine housing. Unfortunately, there's no sports scene mode nor any way to manually control shutter speeds, which seriously limits this camera's excellent 3fps burst mode.

A weakling built-in flash unit, a histogram that can be viewed only in playback mode, and a jerky zoom lens that was difficult to set precisely are among the Digital IXUS 40's other annoyances.

On the plus side, the movie capabilities are outstanding and include in-camera editing features. You can shoot 640x480 clips with monaural sound at 30fps for as long as your memory card holds out with an optional high-speed SD card, as well as 60fps clips for up to 60 seconds at 320x240 resolution.

Performance
The camera's performance was another big plus, thanks to the new Digic II DSP. The Digital IXUS 40 woke up and reported for duty in about 2 seconds and thereafter was willing to snap off a shot every 1.2 seconds (4.6 seconds with flash). In burst mode, we captured six images in a hair more than 2 seconds at full resolution and lowest compression, but if you're willing to sacrifice a minimal amount of image quality and switch from Super Fine to Fine compression, this Canon will happily snap away at a 2.4fps rate up to the capacity of your memory card.

Shutter-lag times were good, amounting to only 0.7 second under high-contrast lighting, and just 0.9 second in low-contrast lighting conditions, thanks to the built-in focus-assist lamp. Battery life was impressive at 692 shots during our tests, which included 50 percent taken with flash, lots of zooming and card reformatting, and other callisthenics. However, the Digital IXUS 40 provided scant warning of impending battery death: the first and only indicator appeared about 40 shots before the cell pooped out.

The LCD viewfinder works well in all but the brightest light outdoors if you can tolerate a little ghosting during subject or camera movement. It's preferable for careful composition to the smallish optical viewfinder, which shows only 82 percent of the image.

Image quality was good for a 4-megapixel snapshot camera, with an adequately wide range of detail in highlights and shadows, nice colour saturation, and only a slight tendency to produce yellow flesh tones. However, images were not exceptionally sharp, and JPEG artefacts were noticeable when we enlarged the images. Chromatic aberration in the form of purple fringing showed up prominently around backlit subjects. Noise wasn't visible in our images at the lower ISO settings, but it appeared in modest amounts at ISO 400. The automatic noise reduction applied to exposures of 1.3 seconds or longer helped a bit.

Edited by Aimee Baldridge
Additional editing by Mary Lojkine