40D Focus Issue

The time has come for me to upgrade my trusty old 20D, which has served me well over the past few years. I decided to upgrade to a 40D and received it on Monday. Yesterday I made a day trip to Parker River NWR on Plum Island, MA to test it out. I was unfortunately very dissapointed with the performance of this camera, which I bought refurbished. I took around 250 images, and can honestly say I did not get a single shot that was in sharp focus, certainly terrible compared to the 20D. The light was dim all day due to clouds, yet the AF on the camera seemed to be quick with my 400 f5.6 and 70-200 f4, yet it could not focus accurately. Even with a tripod, a non moving subject, and high shutter speed, the image would come out blurry with no detail. As you can imagine, I am very frustrated with these results and would like to know if anyone else has had this issue with their camera. Any advice on what I should do would be great too, I'm considering sending it to the Canon Factory Repair Service in NJ.

What focus point did you use? I would test some more in better light with static objects to see if there is front or back focus and if you can't return it for a refund send it to a repair center.

Hey Axel,

Good to hear from you! I used mostly the center point but also used all points activated from time to time. I just got a repair quote from Canon and fortunately is still under warranty, so it won't cost anything. I did try a few shots earlier today in bright sunlight and they seemed to be in focus more, yet the quality does not seem as it should.

Good luck, I hope they can fix it and it should definitely work better than the 20D.

Hi Josh

I had trouble with my old 10D after it went in for a service. They put the focus screen in back to front which put the manual focus point out. So the camera would auto focus correctly but the manual focusing was off. Not sure what mode of focusing you were using but the reverse screen error something to consider if you were only manually focusing, especially on a camera that has just been rebuilt/serviced etc.

DON

If you do plan on sending your camera to Canon for repairs, make sure you tape your name and address to the body itself. Canon has a bad habit of misplacing items in for repairs. By doing this to a couple of lenses, I was able to recover them after Canon initially lost them.

Eric Virkler

Maybe Josh would be more than happy not to get this body back?

I still use a 20D as backup to my 40D and, yes, the 40 should focus noticeably better.