Gadgetory

when I first got into shooting video this was my first camera and when I bought it Canon had a stranglehold on the small form-factor video market thanks to the 5d mark ii s amazing success two years prior in 2008 the mark 3 in 2012 was a solid incremental upgrade but since its release the marketplace has changed a lot and Canada's dominance has absolutely been challenged so can the mark 4 hold its own against the stiff competition that has sprung up from Panasonic Sony and even Fujifilm let's find out mass drop is hosting a drop for the high five and 8350 headphones which you can get for $99.99 US dollars check it out at the link in the video description let's take a quick physical tour of the camera on the right we have two memory slots one SD and one compact flash on the top we find the hot shoe settings display and controls for focus and exposure as well as the mode dial here on the left of the camera we have a flash connector mic in a headphone jack mini HDMI out unfortunately this is a worthless connector and USB the rear of the camera has a shiny 3.2 inch touchscreen quick access buttons a joystick a mode dial and a larger menu selection and settings dial so then out of the box the mark 4 will feel very familiar to anyone who has used a mid tier or better Canon DSLR but with some welcome additions the first usability change that really stood out to me was canons new integrated touch interface whatever Apple might say a smartphone is not a replacement for a DSLR but that doesn't mean we can't learn from them using the touch screen like I would on my phone to set focus points to wherever I wanted in the frame quickly is awesome and became second nature in both video mode and live view for Stills and on that subject live view which I have always avoided for stills on Canon cameras due to its sluggishness and inaccuracy was surprisingly usable I shot portraits of a friend's newborn and in order to get some of the top down shots that I wanted I had to hold the camera in front of me in such a way that I could only see cameras display enough for composition trusting that focus will be taken care of by the cameras dual pixel AF and to my surprise all of these photos came out sharp even with my unintentional changes in distance between each shot so beyond being a convenient way to choose your focus point the face detection AF allows you to use your camera at awkward angles where it's very uncomfortable or even impossible to look through the viewfinder with a stronger confidence that the camera will nail focus for the shot moving on to video mode instead of being only fixated on image quality in this review I wanted to push the camera it's AF in particular to see if I could find success in situations that would normally be very difficult as a solo operator so I put the mark for my glide cam and did a tracking shot on a 35 millimeter lens at F 1.8 and oh my god this is awesome the mark 4 managed to keep Luke in focus even as he was running away in this shot now I know this isn't a new technology from Canon but this is the first time face detection AF was put into a 5d and it has never been better it isn't perfect and while shooting with the mark 4 I did find scenarios that made it stumble but what impressed me even then is how natural looked when recovering from its tumbles it managed to look much more human than any autofocus I've seen in any other camera this is the kind of feature that can legitimately make you look like a better camera operator and even compensate for not having a focus polar in certain situations on top of the performance benefits of the touchscreen paired with the AF the menus in the 5d are a breeze to navigate no more needless scrolling through the same five menus only to click through the wrong one and accidentally click out and start all over again these two are the kinds of little things that can speed up your workflow while shooting leading to ultimately better results let's move on to Canon sensor for the 5d this time around we're looking at a thirty point four megapixel CMOS sensor with an ISO range of 100 to 30 mm on paper it's a very nice bump up in stills resolution from the mark 3 though we'll get more into that later with a slew of new video recording modes including DCI 4k up to 30 fps shooting video on the 5d brought me back to the beginning of my career canna hasn't lost the relative simplicity in the menus compared to my current daily driver the sony a7s - and they've even managed to add quick functions that don't take over your entire live you like on previous cameras so you can finally change settings like white balance resolution frame rate and audio levels all without leaving the live view of the camera thumbs up Canon which leads us to a callin thumbs down that many it brought up when looking over the initial specs of the mark 4 when shooting 4k video the mark 4 has a 1.6 for crop of its full-frame sensor making its effective size roughly similar to an aps-c sensor like my Canon 60d but while I understand the disappointment I also understand that there were probably engineering challenges associated with shooting full-frame 4k and anyway I don't agree that this is should be the top criticism of this camera because while I shoot with a full-frame 35 millimeter field of view on the a7s2 I actually prefer the look of a 1.6 crop for a lot of my projects so when shooting with the mark 4 I actually was quite pleased with the extra reach I got from my lenses I was even able to use one of my favorite lenses the Sigma 1835 F 1.8 which normally doesn't work on a full-frame camera a far bigger issue for me is canons decision to use motion JPEG as the internal codec in 4k this is an ancient codec that is basically only intra frame compression so it's far less efficient than something like the X AVC interframe compression in the a7s2 to put some real numbers to this the data rate for this codec is 500 megabits per second so on a 64 gig card I was getting 16 minutes of record time at 4k in 24 fps compare that to the hour and 10 minutes I normally get from the a7s2 on the same card it should be obvious that aspiring video credits will be asking for a lot of SD cards and hard drives for Christmas this year honestly it feels like they need capped it on purpose to avoid competition with their video cameras the mark 4 still only outputs 1080p over HDMI so any hopes of bypassing the internal codec for 4k video can be put to rest the one redeeming quality the 5d has is the internal recorded footage looks better straight off the camera than the a 7s2 in this shot blown up to 400% the canon has the edge in overall detail and in my opinion canons color science is more pleasing and easier to work with than sony that said the camera has no internal log profile limiting its overall dynamic range so I ended up shooting most of this footage in neutral to get the most out of the sensor without having to use and externally made profile like cinestyle from Technicolor on the still side the mark 4 is as expected excellent raw photos have improved under exposure recovery particularly in the shadows something that the mark 3 is struggle with depending on your image and over the several shoots I did with the mark 4 it performed exactly as I expected which allowed me to forget I was even using it and focus on shooting images are sharp and ISO performance has managed to improve quite a lot as well so in conclusion the mark 4 is the new generation embodiment of what has always been canons goal with the 5d line it's a full-frame workhorse stills camera that has a video mode for the casual or prosumer video enthusiast and it's very good at what it does stills but if you're hoping for another mark to a revolutionary and affordable jack-of-all-trades camera then i'm sorry to say that if the mark 4 is anything to go on that was entirely unintentional and it's not going to happen again the zero tech Dobby drone a product whose name really doesn't make a whole lot of sense does it so zero tech might imply that there's no technology but it actually has a ton in it Dobby well I'm sure if we put a sock on it it wouldn't fly away to its freedom and drone ok I got that part right so it's a selfie drone that fits and folds into your pocket with specifications including a quad-core processor 2 gigs of RAM and Adreno 330 GPU a 13 megapixel camera with a 75 degree field of view that can film 1080 video so you let Dobby take off from the palm of your hand it pairs with zero tax ado not fun app which has built-in tutorials on how to take aerial selfies and you share the photos you capture with the drone in real time so the drone can follow and film moving people or objects to get the shot you want and using outdoor GPS tracking you can film 10-second Auto track short videos it's got a price tag of 399 US dollars on amazon.com and you can check that out at the link in the video description so thank you guys for watching if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in this video at B&H in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store that has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that link in the top right hand corner so check out the video I did on the Ursa mini 4.6 Kay