EOS 400D/DIGITAL REBEL XTi information

Technologies Explained

Picture Style

Picture Style pre-sets simplify in-camera control over image qualities. Picture Style pre-sets can be likened to different film types ­ each one offering a different colour response. Within each selectable pre-set, photographers have control over sharpness, contrast, colour tone and saturation. The camera’s factory default configuration is set to deliver immediately-usable JPEG images without need for additional menu settings. Picture Style presets applied to a RAW image do not degrade the image in any way and can be revised with Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software.

The six pre-sets include:

Standard - for crisp, vivid images that don’t require post-processing

Portrait ­ optimises colour tone and saturation and weakens sharpening to achieve attractive skin tones

Landscape ­ for punchier greens and blues with stronger sharpening to give a crisp edge to mountain, tree and building outlines

Neutral ­ ideal for post-processing

Faithful ­ adjusts colour to match the subject colour when shot under a colour temperature of 5200K

Monochrome ­ for black and white shooting with a range of filter effects (yellow, orange, red and green) and toning effects (sepia, blue, purple and green).

The User Defined Picture Style can be used to store up to three customised pre-sets, or any of the pre-sets available for download from Canon’s web site.

DIGIC II

Now found across the EOS range, DIGIC II is a purpose built, dedicated image processor responsible for the high speed calculations necessary in order to providing exceptionally accurate colour reproduction in real time. Canon’s second generation imaging engine, DIGIC II performs the duties of a number of separate processing units to speed processing, save space, and optimise battery life.

Canon’s processor overcomes the trade-off faced by other manufacturers between camera responsiveness and image quality. With its massive capacity, DIGIC II treats every image with the full complex processing algorithms required in order to deliver superb EOS picture quality, while enabling extended continuous shooting bursts.

CMOS

Canon’s CMOS technology is one of the company’s key competitive advantages, with noise reduction circuitry at each pixel site delivering virtually noise-free images. In comparison with CCD technology, the lower power consumption characteristics of Canon’s CMOS sensors also help optimise battery usage.

CCD sensors use a bucket relay system to transfer each pixel’s accumulated electrical charge to a corresponding gutter. The operation is time consuming and draws considerable power.

By contrast, signal conversion in Canon’s CMOS sensors is handled by the individual amplifiers at each pixel site. Unnecessary charge transfer operations are avoided, vastly speeding up the process of getting signal to the image processor. Noise generation is reduced, power consumption is limited and faster frame rate potential is increased.

Digital Photo Professional Software

Digital Photo Professional software provides high-speed processing of lossless RAW images. Processing with Digital Photo Professional allows real-time display and immediate application of image adjustments, giving control over RAW image variables such as white balance, dynamic range, exposure compensation and colour tone. Images can be recorded in sRGB or Adobe RGB colour space, and the Digital Photo Professional application supports sRGB, Adobe RGB and Wide Gamut RGB colour spaces. An ICC (International Colour Consortium) profile attaches automatically to RAW images converted to TIFF or JPEG images. This allows faithful reproduction of colours in software applications that support ICC profiles, such as Adobe Photoshop. For improved efficiency, a set of image adjustments can be saved as a recipe and applied to multiple images.

Key features

Press release

Specification