Hi guys, welcome. This is Canon's new EOS 60D a mid-range camera, 18 megapixels,
body price of about £900. At the minute we're right in the Priory at
Christchurch and there's an absolutely stunning shot that I've taken already
here - against the blue sky with the church itself. It's a real kind
of 'day out with the camera' but what about the camera itself? What is it's got
that's different? Well it's 18 megapixel camera, APSC
sensor, so you're still going to get the 1.6 times, so great if you need that
extra reach. You've got five frames a second shooting - just over in fact - and it
all runs through the digit 4 processor. Unfortunately unlike its big brother, the
7D, it doesn't have twin processors but nevertheless certainly from what I've
seen, it it does a good job. Now one thing that's particularly unique about this
camera, and a first for Canon in fact, let me just turn the camera around here
you will see it has this pull out, fully rotating 3-inch LCD screen. Now this
is actually just over a million pixels in fact, so 3 inches / a million pixels
absolutely superb. So a unique feature which really does enable you to shoot
with a difference, in terms of if you're up high you can angled your LCD
and actually get a shot particularly if, you know, you're shooting crowds at a scene
and again if you're down low and you want to shoot something like, I don't
know, this time of year perhaps funghi or leaves or sprouting shoots of things,
absolutely excellent for getting the camera down twisting the screen and of
course it's got Live View with a decent autofocus system on it now as well, you
can position the camera down without having to use angle finders or crane your neck
or get yourself filthy dirty as we all used to in the past. What else is new? Now
just the look and feel of the camera is different from things like the 50D and
the 550D, it looks pretty much the same. they obviously keep these things fairly
generic. One thing I think they've downgraded ever so slightly are the
buttons on the back, they just they don't have as positive a feel as some of the
previous Canon models, particularly the play button which to me actually feels a
bit lost. Now they've gone with a rotating wheel on the back
as well and a set of press dial here which is it's very effective and it's
quick and simple to use, and one touch for your video function so now you can
just hit the button straight into live view and of course it will shoot video
on that one touch too if you set it up to do so. Right this screen and some of the
menu features inside the camera that would be interesting to talk
about - it's got Canon's quick menu system which
allows you to quickly find your way around using the the scroll wheel at the
back, so you can change all the quick key functions - and that's the whole point of
it - it's called the quick button. But something that they've added in this
time, following on I suppose from people like Olympus and Pentax
they've added in a menu system so that when you bring up a picture, you've
actually got some in camera editing
options and the first set are just a set of four different filters. So if you go
into the quick menu again, scroll down here to the two little filters, now
you've got what's called creative filters. So you've got in there grainy
black and white which there are three steps to, you've got soft focus, toy
camera effect, which is a little bit like Olympus's toy camera and then you've
got this miniature effect where it puts that band, it works better on high
vantage point pictures with people or objects, where you get that band in the
middle that's actually clearly in focus and just softens the rest into a blur.
Something else that's been introduced into the 60D is it's in camera RAW processing,
so going to the first blue menu, down the bottom here. RAW image processing, click
OK, and press the set button. You can change various different
settings on the camera itself, from things like brightness adjustment you've
got white balance shot settings, picture style settings, auto lighting optimizer.
We've also got high SO speak you know all the kind of in-camera things
that you'd expect. You can even change the quality of the JPEG and the actual
files inside, change the color space so there's an awful lot you can do. Both
with the creative filters and with the raw processing its non-destructive so
what that means is anything that you change it creates a
new JPEG file at the end of this stream of pictures that you've already taken, so
you keep the original and you get a brand-new JPEG. So it's a very clever
function indeed. Built-in flash, guide number of about 13, so powerful enough
suitable enough, for most situations. I think if you are doing something like a
wedding on a bright day it might struggle to actually do any sort of
distance with feeling flush. Now being a good sensor probably one of the best
that can and have actually done in APSC for a long time,
you're going to need to put decent glass on the front of this. I think the
standard later kit lens, mmm... you may become frustrated with and certainly
because the amount of pixels and the quality of the sensor you might find
that you starting to see vignette in the edges or chromatic aberration. My
suggestion would be to put a half-decent bit of glass on the front. From my point
of view I don't think the camera would embarrass itself and I think you'll get
a little bit more from the camera from the resolution that that lens can
provide, it certainly has got enough pixels to be able to cope with that.
Focusing is the usual Canon standard it's fast it's got nine AF points where
the centre one is 2 8th sensitive you have the the 63 zone IFCL sort of
multi contrast colour metering system which is absolutely brilliant. It does
have a tendency to protect the highlights a little bit but that's
probably a safe thing anyway. When you're looking back at your histogram. So all in
all and face value in terms of features, this camera really does stand out, stand
up against its competitors and it is an improvement on something like the 550D.
It's a little bit bigger, slightly faster, I think you certainly get a bit more
resolution out of the camera itself. The only downside really is that £900
price tag but we'll come to that a little bit later.
So what we've done now is actually come down on to the Quay at Christchurch itself.
As you can see the lighting conditions are quite harsh, the sun's
quite high in the sky but I thought this would be sticking the camera in some of
the program modes lets really test it to see what it's all about.
You know it actually handles the situation quite well, focusing is right, it's fast as
you'd expect from a Canon and the meter itself again protects the highlights but
you want that to happen anyway. I'm shooting raw but I've got it in one of
the landscape program modes. I'm going to whip it around put it in
program mode itself just to see if that makes any difference really - same
shot. No difference really, the metering from Canon is consistent, the white
balance from my point of view I actually prefer it to Nikon's to be honest
because it doesn't have that yellowy green kind of hue naturally. It's much
more accurate to my mind and much more what the eye seeing itself
Let me just see if I can catch this boat, let's stick it in sports mode and I'll see what I can do.
Instantly there switching it to sports mode, bang, goes into top gear, we got the
five point three frames a second, focusing ghost continuous AF and let's
have a quick look and see what I've got... yeah, I've got a lovely set of images of
the boat just panning around. So the camera really does perform very, very
well in terms of handling, it's quick to use, focus certainly with the lens I've
got here is the 24 to 105 image stabilized lens, now it's a more
expensive lens but I think to be honest with you, this camera deserves to have
this bit of glass on the front. So there's some swans over there so I'm
going to go and give this screen a try and the constant live view AF.
Let's go and see how it performs over there.
Right, nobody can see we've got some swans in the background there, I've set the camera up put it back in
sport mode I've got the screen out wide-angle and we're just going to see what we can
get shall we? Now, I might get bitten so if you're squeamish look away...
This is great, look at that.
Change to a different mode, a little bit of flash,
let's see we can get it to focus, there we go, that's really good! I'll take the lens
hood off actually because that's getting in the way of the flash.
Let's get a swan's eye view. So this is perfect for what this viewfinder is all about
Look at that!
Okay watch this, this screen is really great, it's good for Candis, little sneaky
shots just a bit of fun really, there's a few old people sitting down over there
so let's grab a shot shall we? I'm going to pretend I'm looking at my screen,
point the camera at them, I've got in live view and in the live AF so it's
more accurate a little bit slower, grab a shot, wait for lock-on - got the shot!
Now I'm sure if Cartier Bresson have this feature he would have loved it...
So what have we got? We've got an 18 megapixel camera APSC sensor, digital processor,
I can go over the spec to the cows come home but is this something that is going
to relight Canon's fire? Not really... It just does what it does very, very well
the flip out screen yeah I really like it
it adds an extra dimension to what you can do with the camera, certainly more
creative angles you can shoot. Image quality? From what I've seen today and
previous tests I've done for the magazine, there very good picture quality,
both in terms of resolution, sharpness, accuracy of color and white balance etc
and even at the very high ISOs up to 3200 ISO there was virtually no noise in
this thing and I was shooting in a horrible dark office, the
camera on the tripod. It got to 64 and then 28 and obviously at the top you
were starting to see some noise but it was pretty damn impressive.
So the all-round this is a very, very good camera, it's just £900 at the
minute is a lot of money. Its competitors at the minute well there's a new Nikon
D7000 - I haven't got my hands on that just yet I've been to the press launch of it
and it looks an impressive camera. Although it doesn't go head-to-head with
this, it's going to be very close and it's the first camera that Nikon have
done that is beyond 12 megapixels that isn't full-frame, so that's a big sea
change for them, it'd be very interesting to see what these two
cameras can do together. But I like Canon gear I really do, it suits me. It fits in
my hand, I like the menu system, I like the pictures that it produces and this
really is for me a very good camera.
£900 is a lot of money but I think it's one of these sorts of cameras that
you will hold on to and the only time you'd probably change it is if you
dropped it and smashed it and they don't make it anymore, or there's a serious
technology change. You might want something like the 7D because you're
shooting something specialized. All around very good camera and for me I
would give it 18.5 out of 20, a very good camera.