A Canon 40d showed up at my office on Wednesday, so I grabbed it as well as a 30d and took them home over the weekend.

I don’t use a 30d so I can’t offer much in the way of a comparison, but thought I’d throw a few comments here after shooting some identical frames with each camera.

The 40d offers some nice improvements, including a larger and brighter screen, a brighter viewfinder, some added sealing which is apparent when comparing the openings for the battery and CF card, auto sensor cleaning , 14 bit a/d conversion.  All in all lots of improvements.

To compare the cameras I used a 70-200 f2.8 IS lens mounted on a tripod, set manually to f 9 and at 100mm.  I took several images from my back porch and compared the them using DPP.

Live view is interesting and somewhat useful at times.  Exposing at 800 iso I felt the 40d had slightly less noise ... small enough to be insignificant.  The 40d images appeared to have a little more contrast, which  I can’t explain unless it was way DPP was handling the 14bit data.

Extra resolution is always nice if it comes without additional noise, which appears to be true in this case.  The menu structure seems more intuitive, and the camera felt easier to use.

So all in all, a nice improvement over the 30d, one that many serious amateurs and pros will be able to make good use of.

I’ll be using the camera a little over the next few weeks, and we’ll be installing it in our beta shooting bay this week to see how well in performs in a portrait environment, as well as whether or not live view is practical in a studio situation.  I’ll post a little more information later.