The Canon Eos 400D is a digital SLR camera designed for amateurs and semi-professional photographers with similar image quality to more expensive equipment.

It comes with a bright 2.5-inch LCD display to see your photos.

This can't be used as a viewfinder to set up shots, but as any pro will tell you, holding the camera to your eye is usually the best way to do this, especially in low-light situations that lead themselves to blurry shots.

The Eos 400D has a lightweight and compact design (not rugged enough for professionals), but small enough to carry around daily in a backpack, in case the opportunity arises for the picture of your dreams.

This model comes with a remarkable 10.1 megapixels of resolution, which is enough to print a 40 x 50 cm photo with decent quality.

The camera is easy enough for the amateur user with automatic and semi-automatic settings in all the functions.

It's also powerful enough for an expert user to play and discover new features on it for a while.

Although it comes with a nine-point autofocus indicator, the main weakness of this camera is not having a spot meter to help you focus in high-contrast shots.

The variation of the ISO (equivalent to the exposure time or film speed) in this camera goes from 100 to 1600, and the noise in 1600 is as little as can be expected on today's digitals.

One of the best tools from the automatic settings is the portrait mode, which automatically blurs the background to make the human subject stand out. It gives people fresh skin tones and soft hair.

Another impressive feature of this camera is that the CCD (what digital cameras use instead of film) will not get contaminated by annoying dust particles, which look awful in photos.

A commercial service would charge hundreds of dollars to clean dust from a photo, but this camera has an ultrasonic vibrating unit attached directly to the low-pass filter (the last filter before the CCD) to remove dust before you take the shot.

To sum up, the Eos 400D is an entry-level priced digital SLR, with more features than most buyers will ever need, user-friendly commands that any amateur will understand and has performance and image quality to satisfy many professional requirements.

The Canon Eos 400D is $1800 from camera shops.

- © Fairfax NZ News