It took just 18 months for Canon to release a replacement for its EOS 30D with the 40D. DP Review just posted a review of the camera, giving a “Highly Recommended” review.
The review states:
“From an image quality point of view the combination of the Canon CMOS sensor and DIGIC III processor means equally detailed images at all sensitivities (except maybe ISO 3200), low noise and a complete lack of unnatural artifacts. The new high ISO speed noise reduction option has no effect on luminance detail but removes any lingering chroma noise , giving high ISO images a more film-like grain; something Nikon has been doing for some time. We would be interested to see Canon using a less strong anti-alias filter which would mean that JPEG images would require less sharpening and would be naturally ‘crisper’ straight off the sensor, but it’s a minor point and would really only be seen by ‘pixel peepers’.
One surprise came from our testing of the cameras dynamic range, it delivered a consistently higher range than both the competition and its predecessor. The majority of this improvement, however, was in the shadow range, a function we presume of the new 14-bit processing pipeline.”
