And once again, this is not oly-specific, i would have written everything i wrote here even if you would have declared the E500 (or E510) the greatest gift to photographers ever manufactured. Quote: Eix, I'm sorry you do not agree with my decision, you are obviously a fan of Olympus and the camera was a close second. Canon have been a little sneaky with the lens mount as the lens has a different mount to the usual EF lenses. Tweaks can also be made to the ISO speed, exposure, colour space, white balance, bracketing and focal points through the menu.

SMC lens and along with the Olympus has a metal bayonet mount so is likely to last longer than the lenses offering a plastic mount. The buttons on the back give options to change the Exposure compensation which doubles up as the aperture control when in Manual, the continuous shooting mode, ISO with ranges from 100 to 1600, Metering areas, AF modes and White balance options. Another indication of the lens quality is the plastic mount as mentioned with the 400D and the standard aperture. Canon is usually pretty good at adhering to that philosophy, making only minor changes to successful products and saving the daring moves for the models that need it.This is a good attempt by the Sony as it has managed to reveal a little detail in the cloud to the left of the image. Finally, ISO1600 has definite noise all over darker areas of the image but the results are still very good. The Canon 400D remains a very good first dSLR, with a balance of automatic, semi-automatic and manual controls to progress through as your creative photography skills improve. Again, the mode dial is situated top right of the camera with scene modes below Auto and programmable modes above.

We're as guilty as anyone of getting excited about shiny new gear and features, but let's not lose sight of the gear we already have by our side. The zoom is very smooth like fluid and when manual focus is selected, the focus ring is a separate area which also has a rubber grip.The Nikon takes SD as it's preferred card format which is a little unusual, but more companies are turning to this format that was once openly snubbed. The E-500 has 13 different settings for ISO and whilst a lot of these are stupidly close to each other to notice a difference, they may come in useful. The Portrait test was taken in Manual or Aperture priority modes with the ISO and White balance being handled manually.

The slightly squarer design is more reminiscent of Minolta than the usual slick curves of Sony, but feels a lot more substantial in the hand. This means if you have been a friend of Pentax since the old days and have a lot of the old lenses, they will fit on the K100D Super however, the camera has to be set up in the custom functions so it knows that a manual lens or extension tubes are attached. UPDATE 18/Dec/06: In our original review a mistake was made in the measurement of ISO sensitivity, this has now been corrected and the releveant pages of this review updated. To trial the cameras in different scenarios, I put them through a Macro, Landscape and Portrait tests. Shot at ISO800 and at the widest aperture I could get with the light and focal length, the shutter speed was 1/40 second and the image is still sharp despite a slow speed.Noise is starting to show in low key which seems to disappear in ISO800 but boosts in the grey area. The macro image gave roughly the same effects as the Canon EOS 400D with balanced light and getting approximately the same distance away.

so I have an issue and I can't find anything on the canon page to help me, but my lcd screen doesn't work so I can have a live view of what I take a picture of. Personally I think the biggest weakness with the Pentax is not the camera body but that Pentax 'DA' lenses currently stop at the 50-200 range. In manual, the shutter is prioritised on the selector dial and the aperture button located just behind the shutter release has to be depressed to alter it. Interestingly, the minimum ISO rating with the Pentax is ISO200, but the results are still very good. The colour rendition on the portrait was good and the macro image, whilst not the closest, gave good detail.The 400D is one of the smallest in the test and a lot of people shy away because they are too small to cope with. The Sony gave the best results on the Landscape with it being the only camera to capture any features in the cloud. With faster cards to download onto, this can only mean that the camera is ready to take another picture quicker than a higher resolution image. The Nikon D40x gave good results in controlled lighting and even the Portrait image had good colour, but had a tendency to get pipped at the post every time.