Gadgetory

I've been shooting with a pre-production version of the Canon EOS 70d for about a week now and while there's a lot that's improved in it including the new autofocus system I hope Canon can tweak the video quality before the camera ships even in its early state the cameras fast the new dual pixel CMOS sensor based autofocus system is responsive and reasonably accurate combined with its seven frame per second burst rate a quick design for changing auto focus area settings and a decent viewfinder it's really quite nice for action shooting not pro class but not too shabby for a twelve hundred dollar body video the touch focus works well for racking it snaps decisively but not unattractively fast from subject to subject the camera has the roughly the same body design as the 60d with some important tweaks the mode dial is more streamlined with fewer auto options the articulated LCD has canons very nice touch screen with its excellent interface and the lock button for the multi controller is better my one complaint is about the multi controller it's smaller than before and even harder to precisely manipulate also the 70d only has a single SD card slot compared to dual slots in the nikon d70 100 it does have a reasonable if not stellar Wi-Fi implementation as well my only significant issue with the camera in its current state pre-production is the image quality part of that stems from canons default color settings which I've never liked that will probably live through till final production and you certainly have the ability to change them to something more natural and less crunchy JPEGs look fine through iso 1600 pretty comparable to the d70 100 but even in RAW files there doesn't seem to be a lot of preserved highlight detail in high contrast shots and I couldn't bring up shadows without introducing more noise than I liked that said the still photo quality remains pretty competitive however based on my testing the video quality still needs some work before the camera ships even in the all I codec at best it looks the same as the video from the t5 I it displays tons of edge artifacts ringing alias Moray and crawling edges but more disappointingly poor detail resolution and limited tonal range well light video is exceptionally noisy if Canon can't improve at least a little bit before shipping that will be sad it would be ashamed to tie such a great autofocus system to such a minute video I'm Laurie grinning and this is an early version of the Canon Yosemite