AdrianWarren.com: Reviews: Canon EOS 400D
The EOS 400D supports sharpness settings ranging from 0 to +7 in camera, whereas the 350D supported a range of -2 to +2. DPP v3 has a sharpness range from 0 to 10, fortunately a sharpening setting of 1 in DPP performs identically to a setting of 1 on the 400D. The results at zero are very soft; so soft that I suspect that as the name suggests it simply disables sharpening. Sharpening haloes start to become overwhelming by +6, so a setting between +2 and +5 is probably optimal for JPEG use.
Sharpness 0 (Neutral/Faithful)
Sharpness 1
Sharpness 2 (Portrait)
Sharpness 3 (Standard/Monochrome)
Sharpness 4 (Landscape)
Sharpness 5
Sharpness 6
Sharpness 7
Contrast settings range from -4 to +4 on the 400D and in DPP, another change from the EOS 350D settings of -2 to +2. On the 400D a setting of -4 applies a relatively gentle tone curve to the JPEG file resulting in low contrast, a setting of +4 results in punchy images, but at an increased risk of clipping to both shadow and highlight regions.
Contrast -4
Contrast -2
Contrast 0
Contrast +2
Contrast +4
