Andrew Reid

Look guys, we established this YEARS ago, you can shoot with a T2i or any old shit like Kendy did and do great work, especially if it is a low-fi look in the first place that you're after and you rarely use a lens other than 50mm equivalent (a wider lens would show up the lack of resolution). We have also established that you can then upload this to Vimeo and if the content and shooting is compelling, the locations and characters cinematic looking, well lit and they kept the ISO below 800, when the viewer watches this at 720p on a laptop or TV, they won't notice that it isn't 4K wide dynamic range. But image quality advances exist for a reason, they help to evolve the art of story telling and make the tools more flexible so they can be used in more challenging circumstances and a wider variety of situations. I love slow-mo for instance, it's a great creative tool, and I love LOG as it is a substitute for raw when you want to apply a stylised look in post and get a couple of more stops dynamic range, without the much larger file sizes. I shot this in slow-mo and LOG for creative reasons and they made an interesting subject look beautiful - Couldn't have done that on a T2i or 80D, or indeed any Canon camera I can afford. Do they even have decent looking 120fps on their Cinema EOS stuff??! And when I shot this on the A7S, GH4 and Nikon D750, the pinsharp details and lack of moire, plus the slow-mo again, helped creatively bring out the look I needed. If you don't want to focus on this kind of thing then fine, get the 80D and enjoy your AF. Nothing wrong with that. You might tell some great stories and do it really stylistically. But in my view... image quality and frame rates and extra features are there to be USED. Pointless writing a blog about cameras otherwise. If everyone was happy to stick to 80D level of image quality and features then my job would be much easier and I'd have far fewer cameras!! And then there is also a lot to be said for the motion cadence of a global shutter and vintage super 16 lenses too, which is what gave this shoot the look I wanted, down to a tee... So before you write off all the exciting specs and just nerdy pixel peeping, consider what they give creatively and stylistically and consider what you are missing out on when you sacrifice all this for convenience's sake with the 80D!!

@CMB - rivalling the Alexa at a fraction of a cost is what this website is all about!! I am not calling out your quality of work, so no need to jump on the defensive there. Clearly though your clients don't notice heavy moire and aliasing, a lack of detail and a lack of dynamic range, otherwise they would have asked you to reshoot it with a proper camera like a RED or Arri, or even an A7S II Maybe you should hang out at JustATool.com instead, and you might find more people who agree with you. I heard they moved the mic and headphone jack out of the way of the pivoting screen too. For me those at JustATool.com this would be music to their ears, who cares about 4K for $700 when you have that kind of innovation from Canon. I think we should just STOP with the image quality increases... people just want the mic slot well positioned. Here is how image quality works... A good camera makes an ordinary shot look nice, with creamy smooth roll off, no noise, tons of detail and a wide dynamic range at the same time as doing very richly saturated natural looking colour. A bad camera does none of that. That's the 80D. But you can make it look good with the right subject and light and composition. So the 80D can look good and especially at longer viewing distances on a large screen, just a TV in the home will be enough, you won't notice the moire and aliasing as much, but when you get a scene that challenges it - say wide angle shot with lots of hard lines and high contrast detail with very large variations between the brightest and darkest parts of the frame you are going to have something that looks like it crawled from Donald Trump's toilet after a particularly hot curry.

Maybe his work doesn't demand high performance. I haven't seen it, so couldn't know.

GH2 was 2010 (October) 6 years later and Canon haven't matched its video quality, overall. Like I say time and time again, only Canon seem to be able to get away with this year after year. If it were any other company, people would be astounded. At the same time, since 2009 their APS-C stills quality has inched forward only a bit from 18MP to 20MP and now 24MP with a tiny bit cleaner shadows.

Seems you have just contributed to the 30% misinformation. Oops. The XC10 article was my first impression of the announcement (paper specs) from almost a year ago. I have bought one recently for a specific purpose, you'll see soon on the blog. Here's a factoid for you....80D video quality ranks below almost everything else on the market, but hey... AF.

Douglas is All Chin and no mouth.

Going to be either a crop or pixel binned from that 100MP sensor, so it's not going to go challenging RED for image quality any time soon. Besides they have by far the better raw codec and 8K raw coming soon as well.

It's always a balance between convenience and image quality. I'd love every camera to have the great colour science, AF and ergonomic simplicity of a Canon. However I'd love every affordable Canon camera to have decent image quality compared to the 4K competition, something they lack. We'll get there one day.

Maybe I have been living in Germany far too long.

Props to you and JG Harding for recognising a dark horse of a camera.

Also I just bought an XC10!

@CMB the T2i was around for a long time and it had its day, a lot of great stuff shot on it, in the same way there were great Pixar animations developed on very old 90's workstations. This does not excuse Canon in any way. If Apple for example had neglected the quality of their stills on iPhones since 2009 as Canon have done with video on their APS-C DSLRs, it would be seen as totally strange behaviour, really bizarre and unacceptable to all iPhone users interested in photography. The only reason content producers and YouTuber's still care about the 80D is that a lot of people don't care about perfection or the details. They just want to grab a brand they trust and make content as quickly and as easily as possible with the lenses they already have. The other companies have put in a less than solid showing to be honest, in fighting back against Canon and Nikon. Flakey and disjointed. Panasonic only have the GH line, which doesn't have a broad appeal to the masses due to the lenses being massively overpriced, complexity of the spec, odd sensor crop vs the rest of the market and less than stella ISO 1600-6400 performance indoors. Meanwhile Sony have too many models, very confusing, reliability issues on top of that like overheating, over complex specifications and menus, poor usability and again incredibly expensive lenses. Canon have had it easy. The people who will buy a 80D probably see 4K as slowing them down in the edit, when a lot of the material is quite time critical. I can't see them lusting after an A7S II any time soon.

eBay is your friend.

Wow that seems to make a difference with the Video Mic Pro, I've never had good results with it on a DSLR. NX1 preamps especially seem pretty poor. Nice job sir.

Talking about Special Purposes.... how about being the only $1000 camera with Super 35mm 4K recording, 13 stop dynamic range with LOG, small file sizes, built in EVF, 120fps in full HD and the best autofocus system under the $6000 1D X Mark II pro DSLR.

Well the A7S colour weaknesses are sadly all too clear in that clip. Noisy, compressed, inaccurate, thin and dreadful on the Rec.709 conversion, only the custom LUT (with a lot of expertise efforts) can save it even after that dodgy white balance, mixed light, exposure all remain difficulties faced by Sony users. Sony need to make it EASY to get Canon or Nikon like colour from their cameras. They should really trash their entire picture profiles line-up and start again.

I should get paid for this babysitting work!

No framing differences if you set stills to 16:9 and shoot raw, then you can claim back the 3:2 in Photoshop.

Because I shot with it myself!!

The 1D X II of course it doesn't look awful, but it does have an awful codec. It should have had the XF 300Mbit/s 4K codec of the XC10 but the processors aren't fast enough and there's no room for an XC10 style exhaust vent & fan due to the weather sealing.

PP6 is 1.5 or 2-stop to the right (over exposed on the meter). The rest you should aim for a nice even spread in the histogram or 0 on the meter. The reason I recommend shooting in M mode rather than Movie mode is the shutter is not disabled for stills, you can quickly reel one off, very useful, also the AF is much quicker for a quick shot setup, furthermore the manual focus assist quality gets a very useful and significant bump up so that it is useable, whereas the one in movie mode is a dreadful fuzzy mess. If the exposure is shifting between M mode live view and recording, are you describing a slight gamma shift or might it be another setting which is interfering? Check that movie exposure in the main menu is also set to M. Also if you're relying on the meter for very precise exposure, it's not a good idea. It's not very useful for precise adjustments. It's better to check the histogram instead.

It's not been out very long, but it's maybe that the Pocket was a new concept and very much aimed at us, whereas the Micro is more aimed at pros who need a POV camera in a fridge. I am as confused as you are about Blackmagic's move away from the enthusiast market.

I've had the Auto ND confirmed to me. The extent of the raw capabilities is new.... wow 4K 60p and 240fps 1080p very nice. A direct tap on the same sensor as the FS7, bypassing the lesser processor inside the FS5. Very generous of Sony but I'd expect the cost to be similar to the price difference between the FS5 and FS7... so not exactly a cheap firmware update? Anyway let's wait and see.

When looking at the leaf and lime test, it's important to realise how the reach of the lens compensates for the lack of resolving power of the camera. Wider angles and infinity focus shots are an appropriate test of resolution. Lime trees on end of a 50mm or 85mm with shallow DOF? Not so much. As for colour it is true Canon have this better sorted than Sony but there's no way that is saving the 80D as a filmic choice. The shot Ben posted demonstrating A6300 colour has hardly any colour in it, it's a horribly overcast grey day, grey street, grey building and white van!! Come on people, common sense should start prevailing. There are no convincing tests or samples so far that show the strengths and weaknesses or either camera. When Canon get the video image right, they really do get it right. The 80D is not one of those cameras. The 1D C, C100 II, C300 II, XC10 all have a beautiful look to their images. It's no coincidence they are all Cinema EOS cameras. Canon's strategy quite clear I think!

They only have hamsters working on the DSLR video side, they transferred the more intelligent bunny rabbits to the Cinema EOS department. Sony only have guineapigs.... Us!