 I'm Sean Hollister with The Verge, and this is the Canon T4i, the latest camera in Canon's prosumer line. You may notice it looks a lot like the T3i from last year, and it actually shares the same 18 megapixel APS-C sensor as the T2i the year before that. If you took pictures with all three cameras at the exact same place, time, and with the same settings, you'd get very similar images. The difference is the T4i figures out more of those settings for you, and gives you more and simpler controls. Externally it looks the same, but the buttons stick out further, making them easier to find by touch. The power switch now has a third position to switch you directly into movie mode, without having to turn the mode dial all the way around. And most importantly, the 3-inch 1.04 million dot articulating screen that pivots 270 degrees up and 90 degrees down, it's now a touchscreen, and lets you control every part of the camera. That might not sound like much of an advantage if you're a fan of physical controls, but it can actually be quite a help. For one thing, if you put the touchscreen in one hand, and the physical controls in the other, you can navigate to settings faster than with either alone. For another, in live view mode, you can tap directly on a spot to autofocus there, or even touch a particular subject in the viewfinder to take a picture as soon as they come into focus. Canon's done a pretty good job with the touchscreen gestures. You can not only tap, but swipe through controls quickly, and zoom in on photos with pinch to zoom. But the best part about using the touchscreen is that it doesn't make a sound when you're in movie mode. With the T4i, Canon's added stereo microphones, audio leveling, and most importantly, continuous autofocus during video recording. If you're a serious film maker, you're probably going to want to stick to manual focus, but for home movies and the like, it's not bad at all. We found that it did detect objects in front of us fairly easily and switched between focus points, although for things that were further away it had trouble locking onto anything at all. It's also not particularly quick to focus, even with the new STM lenses that the company rolled out. They do focus smoothly and silently, but quickly, not so much. Images come out crisp, bright and clear, exactly as you'd expect from a DSLR of this class, but not much more. For instance, images in low light aren't necessarily any less noisy than its predecessors, though they are slightly brighter and more detailed. Autofocus has definitely improved. With the full nine cross-type autofocus points compared to the one of its predecessors, we had a much easier time focusing on distant subjects than either of the other two. There's an auto-picture style mode now, which can let you get more color out of scenes without you having to select one yourself, and two dedicated positions on the dial for multi-shot noise reduction and HDR mode. Both combine several images together, four for the multi-shot or three for the HDR, and they produce surprisingly good results. As you can see here, the HDR can definitely improve the overall exposure of the image, although you do lose some detail in the process. The very best new feature of the T4i isn't on the spec sheet or any press release, though. It's the far more professional sound that the reflex action of the camera makes when the mirror flips up. It's just so much more satisfying to hear that, rather than the T2i and T3i screech whenever you take a shot. That reflex action is probably also responsible for the improved speed here. The T4i captures five images per second, as opposed to the 3.7 of the earlier cameras, and if you've got a sufficiently fast SD card, the buffer is quick enough at shoving out those images that you can keep snapping indefinitely. If you've already got a T2i or T3i, don't plan to use the touchscreen, and don't do a lot of video recording, there's perhaps not any reason to upgrade right now. But if you do, or if you're a first-time DSLR buyer looking for an all-purpose camera that's easy to use and has interchangeable lenses, the T4i is an easy sell.