Big test Morecontent Visit photo raphynews.co.uk
including 'off ', while the AF area and drive buttons still have a very healthy 34 options. Pushing the info button scrolls the monitor through five view options, froma plain screen to a fully informed, very busy view – you’ve got three options when the EVF is in use. With the touch setting active, any feature in an outline box can be touch activated and adjusted. This includes the virtual Q button, which brings upmany more virtual buttons to control and adjust the camera’s key functions. Evenmore controllability is provided by the rear multicontroller and the various buttons around it. All this flexibility and information can be a trifle overwhelming to start with, but once you spend some time with the set- up, followed by a period of familiarisation, the EOSM6Mark II is a fine camera to use and intuitive, too. The dual function feature, I think, deserves a special mention, because I loved it. The EOSM6Mark II uses Canon’s highly acclaimed Dual Pixel CMOS autofocusing. Its phase detection pixels means the autofocus zeroes on the subject accurately and without any hesitancy. That’s not to say the systemgot it right every time, because it didn’t. Shooting in busy streets, the face detect trackingmode did not always pick up on the right subject. Using touch AF in zone or single point AF was effective, however, and with the monitor out at 90° for waist-level viewing, this proved a good way of working. My sample also struggled and even missed the point of sharpness in very low light, despite the claimed -5EV low-light working range. Manual focusing is aided by focus peaking and the option of two degrees of magnification, 5x and 10x – focus peaking is not available inmagnified view. The
PERFORMANCE: EXPOSURE LATITUDE
-3EV
-2EV
-1EV
frame. However, the same could not be said of frames exposed at +3EV and they looked poor, especially highlight areas. Overall, the EOSM6 Mark II’s Raws had decent rather than exceptional exposure latitude, but it was still a good showing.
matters improved in the -2EV shot and by the time we got to the -1EV image, the corrected shot looked almost identical to the correctly exposed frame. With overexposure, the +1EV and +2EV frames recovered impressively to look like the correctly exposed
I bracketed sets of full-size Raws in a variety of lighting conditions from dull days to direct into-the-sun shots. The Raws were exposure corrected in Lightroomand Canon DPP. The -3EV shots corrected well, although noise was obvious in midtones and shadow areas, but
+1EV
0
+3EV
+2EV
PERFORMANCE: CR3 OR CRAW?
The Canon EOSM6Mark II offers the option of saving Raw images as full- size Raw format or CRaw, giving file sizes of around 39-42MB or 21-25MB respectively.The CRaw algorithm gives smaller,memory-saving files, so that is a serious benefit both in shooting and storage provided that any quality loss is acceptable.As a guide, on a 16GB card you get around 366 full-size Raws compared with roughly 624 CRaws. I shot images in both formats in dull and bright light, at high and To be honest, viewed at 100%on screen or in print, for themajority of my test shots, Raw and CRaw gave indistinguishable results, so I think I would use the space-saving CRaw option asmy default. If confronted by an awesome view in contrasty light I wanted to print up toA2 – and assuming I remembered – I would switch to Raw, but then I wouldn’t fret if I didn't, because CRaw is capable. medium ISO settings and with different exposures. Files were processed in Lightroomand Canon DPP and checked on screen at 100% to see if there were any differences.
FULL SIZE RAW - ISO 100
FULL SIZE RAW - ISO 1600
COMPRESSED RAW - IOS 100
COMPRESSED RAW - IOS 1600
Issue 74 | Photography News 33
photographynews.co.uk
Powered by FlippingBook