Canon EOS 70D review

Canon EOS 70D review

What is it?
The Canon EOS 70D is Canon’s top enthusiast level camera of the moment. If you want more from a DSLR, you’re probably a professional.

What’s great?
Picture quality, picture quality, picture quality. Oh, and the picture quality is amazing too.

What’s not?
The creative filters could be better but we’re really reaching for something bad to say here.

The bottom line:
This is a terrific mid-level DSLR camera. It has a solid, usable design, a lifetime of guides and features to explore and captures wonderful colour photographs at even low light levels. Buy it.

Canon

Canon EOS 70D: Review

Canon's marketing spiel around the 70D is all about making that step up. Of course, stepping up is a relative affair and just how big a stride that is all rather depends upon from where you step.

The headline specs are about an improved and speedy autofocus (AF) system. That's certainly impressive to anyone stepping up from a compact camera, an entry-level DSLR and even an older mid-range model but pace and snaps per second are treats to which CSC mirrorless camera owners are already used.

So, are the powerful image processor and larger sized image sensor - and the picture quality that they promise - enough to attract those who might be turning towards smaller, hybrid machines? MSN Tech spent some time with the 70D to find out.

Canon EOS 70D: DSLR body

The 70D is a lump. There’s no getting around that but, if you’re in the market for a DLSR, size simply shouldn’t come into it. Flexibility and image quality care not brawn and bulk at these levels, so you’re going to have to accept that carrying around a 755g chunk of aluminium and polycarbonate resin is part of the deal. It could feel a little nicer in the hand but the plastic over metal finish is certainly smart enough and does allow for plenty of surface area without it turning into a real rock.

Over said surface, there be buttons; lots of buttons - and that’s just what you’d hope for because the more buttons you have at your fingertips, the less time you’ll spend scrolling the menus to find the settings that you’re after. Buttons are shortcuts and there’s shortucts to ISO, AF type, AF area, shooting speeds and light metering as well as two control wheels and everything you need for previewing your photos too.

Speaking of which, the 3-inch (7.6cm) LCD screen on the rear is superb. It’s both of the full vari-angle type and has all the resolution you could need with over 1 million dots of information on display at any time. And for those who prefer English - it flips out and it’s so clear, bright and accurate that you could happily watch telly on it.

The piece de resistance, though, is that it’s a touchscreen. We’re big fans of touchscreens on cameras. When you can’t find the button or menu to change the setting you want, all you need to do is poke the screen at the icon or area of relevance. And with that little addition, the 70D becomes something that's reactively easy – if very extensive - to use.

Canon EOS 70D: New autofocus feats

The 70D features a newly designed 20.2-megapixel APS-C sized sensor. All that resolution means that you can blow up your photos nice and big or, more likely, you can crop in quite far before the image starts to get pixelated; a good way of zooming if you don’t happen to have a telephoto lens.

What’s more interesting though is that Canon has added what the company refers to as Dual Pixel technology. Each of those 20.2 million pixels is actually split into two distinct parts, each of which are used to detect focus in different ways. The results mean both a faster autofocus system as well as one that’s smoother at tracking focus while you’re subject is moving, and that’s excellent when you’re shooting either video or something that won't sit still.

We certainly agree with Canon’s claims. The spontaneous movements of babies and small children didn’t hamper any of our shots. It couldn’t keep up with a butterfly across a late summer meadow but then we’re not sure what can.

Possibly the only thing to bear in mind is that the Dual Pixel set up doesn’t seem to make the AF any noticeably more accurate. There were still plenty of times when our intended subject was mistaken but, at the least, there are 19 AF markers for the camera to use and that certainly makes this machine competitive among other mid-level DSLRs.

Dan Sung

Canon EOS 70D: Low light shooting

As for the image processor, it’s a big upgrade on what’s found in both the 60D and 7D that sit either side of this EOS DLSR. The DIGIC 5+ is what runs the show in the 70D and it help can pull off the kind of low light photography that puts our, admittedly far older, Nikon D80 to shame. There’s 7 years in age between these two similarly placed cameras but the advances in what the 70D can capture are pronounced.

It’s not just that you can push the ISO light sensitivity settings up far higher on the 70D - up to 12,800 before you hit the extended range – but the real difference is over the quality of what you get when you do so. Normally, we’d expect images to be covered in noise at ISO 6400 and for colours to ruined but results from the 70D at these setting are actually quite good. Better still, is that even it’s hard to notice any issues at all until you reach ISO 1000.

The upshot of all that jargon, in a practical sense, is that you can shoot in almost any light without having to use either a flash or a tripod. They won’t be super-clean photos at the higher levels but it’ll only be the kind of low noise that the untrained eye would miss.

Canon EOS 70D: Amazing image quality

Let’s get down to brass tacks. The image quality you can get - and get very easily - from this DSLR is unrivalled at this level. The Canon EOS 70D is quite simply ahead of everything else in its class at the moment.

There’s the P, S, A and M modes you’d expect which, along with Automatic+, take you all the way from point and press up to full manual control. On top of that, there’s scene modes to choose from as well as Canon’s Creative Auto or CA setting that’s a way for you to achieve different results without really having to know anything about shutter speeds, aperture and ISO; the camera asks you in more end-focused terms and figures out the stops and settings accordingly

Whichever mode you choose for, the pictures you get are excellent. The Dual Pixel AF system ensures that everything is nice and sharp but what really stands out is the colour saturation. It can be so hard in photography to truly translate the vibrant tones and subtle hues that you pick up with the human eye into digitised form but the 70D absolutely nails. It’s really only at those upper ISO levels where the accuracy starts to tail off.

And if you like what you capture – which you will – then you'll be pleased to note that not only is this camera fast to focus but it's fast to shoot too. It'll bang out 7fps at full resolution. There's a limit of a volley of 16 pictures if you want to shoot RAW files but, if JPEGs are ok with you, then you can bag up to 65 photos at that speed.

Dan Sung

Canon EOS 70D: Creative control

Of course, if capturing the bright colours around you isn’t enough, then the 70D has taken a leaf out of the CSC camera book and offers a little creative control too. They’re not the easiest settings to access but, so long as you’re using Liveview mode (i.e: composing shots using the 3-inch LCD rather than looking through the viewfinder) then there’s a few artistic filters to play with.

There’s Toy Camera, Miniature, Grainy B&W, Water Painting, Art Bold, Soft Focus, and even an approximated fish-eye effect. While it’s nice to see this kind of fun arrive in DLSR cameras, what’s on show is still a long way from that which Panasonic and Olympus offer in their Lumix-G and PEN Micro-Four-Thirds camera ranges.

It’s understandably but frustratingly restrictive that you can't use these filters through the viewfinder and it’s also something of a surprise that the processor takes so long to calculate the image. Worst of all, though, the effects aren’t wildly good either. They’re not that bad, well worth including but, hopefully, just the start of what we’ll see in DSLRs going forward.

Canon EOS 70D: Wi-Fi and connections

All good cameras these days must come with Wi-Fi. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to think of the last MSN camera review where wireless transfer wasn’t involved.

As ever, the wireless system is not as smooth as it might be. You can piggyback a local network to send images to phones, computers and DLNA-enabled AV equipment or the 70D also has its own Wi-Fi loop that it can set up direct to another device instead. In practice, all of this transfer means installing some kind of software to get it up and running. That’s ok if we’re talking about your phone or your home computer but it’s something of an unfortunate faff if you’re trying to send pictures to a friend’s handset in a one off situation. In that instance, you'd need to use some half-rate mobile broadband connection to get the app first, most likely, and that makes wireless image transfer simply more trouble than it’s worth.

Probably the most enjoyable connected feature of the Canon 70D is the fact that there are Android, PC and iOS apps that mean you can remote control your DSLR and take photos with it by using your tablet, laptop or smartphone. There’s not quite the full suite of settings to play with but certainly enough to make things fun.

In the way of hard connections, you’ll be relieved to note that Canon has not taken leave of its collective senses and the company has remembered to include HDMI, microphone and headphones sockets too; all easy to access and all well worth adding.

Canon EOS 70D: Verdict

We really can’t recommend this camera highly enough. Nothing is truly perfect in this world - no ruled lines are completely straight, no cast-iron guarantees so watertight that not a droplet will escape - but the Canon EOS 70D is up there with the surest of best cameras in their class that we’ve ever had the pleasure to use.

The creative filters are limited compared to what you can find in other sorts of snappers and the Wi-Fi is predictably clunky to set up but the core functions - those of actual picture and video taking - are such a joy, that it would be a crime to buy anything else at the same price point. The 70D is a very good camera indeed.