DPReview always does an excellent job reviewing digital cameras, and many people would consider them the de facto go-to camera review site. Endless pages upon pages of test results and image comparisons, graphs, charts, and lots of full-size images to pixel peep. And now they’ve posted their review of the Canon 40D, all 29 pages of it.

What’s the verdict? No big surprise, it’s a highly recommended camera. The main negative points they list aren’t a big deal, in my opinion at least. Those negatives include poor automatic white balance under incandescent lighting, which is something that every single Canon camera has; apparently it’s an intentional decision by Canon to give incorrect white balance in order to give a warmer image, and they keep getting dinged in reviews because of it.

Another downside they note is that their burst shooting speed is slower than Canon’s specs say it should be, down to 6 fps at 1/500 sec shutter speeds. They also point out the useless “print” button on the camera, wasting a button that could be used for something more photographically useful. But they do say that it’s tough to find negatives with it, it’s an excellent camera.

And tons of praise, of course:

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.

I don’t suppose there have been any negative reviews of the 40D, have there? It seems like you can’t really go wrong with it, especially if you’re buying it for me as an early Halloween present. Please?