Having had a slew of point and shoot digicams through my
hands recently, I was at first surprised at how immediately user-friendly the
650D appeared.
The mode dial carried all the usual settings —
auto, Program AE, shutter and aperture priority plus manual; then there are
positions for intelligent and creative auto actions as well as direct commands
for landscape, close up, sports etc on the same dial …plus handheld HDR
shooting. As you can see, the camera is operable for many situations without
any need to access the finder menu
The rear of the camera has a few more buttons, taking you to
AF settings, aperture compensation, replay, live view etc. There’s not a forest
of controls to bewilder the newcomer so the camera could be quickly grabbed and
deployed without a lot of fuss or preparation. There is of course an extensive
menu system to open the doors to more sophisticated picture making.
Handling? The camera sits well in the hand and is not a
bulky monster. A comparison: the EOS 5D Mark III is roughly one fifths larger overall
and weighs more than 50 per cent more. Quite a difference!
It’s only when you know that the body construction employs
stainless steel and polycarbonate resin with glass fibre in its makeup that you
realise how the weight saving was achieved. Having said that, when the 18-135mm
lens was strapped on, the camera became quite noticeably forward-heavy.
The camera can pull 18 megapixels of still image, so that
means the maximum image size of 5184×3456 pixels can lead to a 41x29cm print —
or a mess of image cropping! Don’t knock it!
Movies? 1920×1080 Full HD is on board, captured in MPEG4 and
written to an SD card of at least Class 6 rating. A 4GB card will hold 11
minutes of full res video; the camera can record a video sequence of 29 minutes
and 59 seconds maximum length at a lower res.
In movie mode you can adjust AF by a gentle squeeze on the
shutter button or the camera’s system will do it for you; in reality, it is
possibly better to leave focus as it is. No, you can’t shoot stills while
shooting video.
I normally shoot video with a DSLR by holding the camera at
waist level, tilting the vari-angle finder upwards to view. You may notice some
shots in my test are off level. Why? To tilt the LCD upwards it has to be swung
off to the side; this was enough to give me a mistaken impression of level.
Watch out for the same effect!
The touch screen vari-angle LCD screen will please many as
it swings 175 degrees laterally and rotates 180 degrees in a vertical arc. With
the touch screen, you can touch the face of a person and the camera will remain
focused on them while they remain in the picture. Touch focus can also be used
in video mode, however the effects of continuous AF will only be achieved with
the use of an STM lens. The STM lenses offer another benefit in video shooting
with reduced noise when AF is operating.
The AF system uses a nine point cross-type array for
focusing, along with a dual-cross point in the centre allows for faster,
precise focusing when using f/2.8 lenses. Two different focusing systems —
phase detection and contrast detection — have been used to to deliver rapid
focusing performance, a big help in stills shooting and, even more noticeably,
in movie capture.
If you need continuous shooting the maximum rate is a useful
5fps.
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