Camera test 35
Photography News | Issue 55 | photographynews.co.uk
Performance: exposure latitude
-4EV
-3EV
To look at the exposure latitude of the EOS M50’s Raws, a manual bracket with a tripod mounted camera was shot. On a bright, hazy day the manual meter reading at ISO 100 showed that settings of 1/125sec at f/8 were needed. The images were adjusted and processed through Lightroom. It is typical that Raws recover from underexposure better than overexposure, and so it proved on
the EOSM50. The -1EV shot looked like the original but from -2EV you can see the early signs of artefacting and detail looked coarser although perfectly acceptable up to -3EV. Overexposure was tolerated less well and files shot at +3EV and +4EV could not be recovered with any degree of success at all. The highlights just had that veiled grey look that you can’t do anything with, so while low contrast shots
could work, introduce a bright sky and you are stuck. More moderate overexposure to +1EV and +2EV is much more correction friendly so you should have no problems here. In summary, the EOS M50 has decent exposure latitude with a better showing for underexposure compared with overexposure, but it’s probably not as good as leading APS-C cameras in this respect.
-2EV
-1EV
0
+1EV
Original image
+2EV
+3EV
Images The exposure latitude of the new, more compact Raw format from the EOS M5 proved pretty good, especially with underexposure where the heavy shadows recovered quite nicely with minimal noise.
+4EV
have just three options, and the *AEL button has six options while the remaining six buttons all give 26 options, including off. Pushing the Q button (either the physical or the virtual one) brings up 11 virtual buttons so here you can quickly set self-timer, light measuring pattern and aspect ratio, for example. In the monitor’s normal view, five icons have a thin outline box to tell you these are virtual buttons to take you into key camera features – ISO, focus magnifier, exposure compensation, aperture and touch shutter enable/disable. Pushing the INFO button scrolls from this option to adding a spirit level, plain screen and then into another settings screen, where touching the Q icon makes key features active so you can adjust settings fromhere. Essentially, the EOS M50 caters for all preferences in terms how you want to set up and use the camera, and accessing everything is easy. I mostly shot in aperture-priority AE mode, with the odd excursion
into manual as well as the creative, subject and art filter modes. I stuck with the Evaluative light measuring pattern. After close to one thousand exposures I can report that the exposure system’s accuracy and consistency rate highly. That said, I did use exposure compensation and the selective metering button on occasion when the system didn’t get it quite perfect, which wasn’t too often. To be fair, the good exposure latitude of the Raw files meant that there was plenty of room for fine-tuning in post so I could forego compensation except in the most contrasty situations, when I needed to choose between recording highlights or shadows. Autofocusing proved generally as good as the camera’s exposure system but the face and tracking option can be a bit more random, as is often the case with multi-point systems. If there was no face in shot, the system could latch onto the wrong part of the scene, so you need to watch for this and use the touchscreen to help the camera focus where youwant. Most of the time the systemworkedwell but give it a busy scene and it was less surefooted. In that respect, the zoneAF (which has a grid of 5x5 AF points) and single AF options were preferable, and being able to pick the focus zone on the touchscreen very quickly made shooting more decisive, even though you do not get 100% coverage. Overall, the AF system’s ability rates highly and it was accurate and only occasionally
Images Our test period enabled us to shoot in a variety of lighting and the EOS M50 coped generally very well, with the AF, exposure and auto white-balance systems delivering sharp, lifelike images time after time.
stumbled, sometimes due to an inability to lock onto the subject and sometimes due to user error. The latter was usually down to touching the screen inadvertently, therefore moving the AF point away from where you expected it to be and not realising this until it was too late. So while focus was fine, it was not necessarily where you wanted it. The EOS M50 is not really an action camera, but its 10fps continuous shooting rate with single AF, dropping to 7.4fps with servo AF, is more than enough for most users. I did try some continuous tracking on walkers and cyclists using the face and tracking mode with modest success. Sometimes locking onto the subject was uncertain, which made
subsequent tracking difficult, but on other occasions the AF locked on and tracked reasonably well. Success rate was higher with a bigger, strongly defined subject, such as a car. To be fair, though, as I said: the EOS M50 isn’t designed for fast action, so my expectations weren’t high – with that in mind, I thought it did pretty well. Still image quality at the low/ medium speed ISO speeds is very good. My out-of-the-camera JPEGs looked good and punchy, and I processed my Raws in Lightroom with some extra dehaze and clarity to give comparable, crisper-looking shots with better contrast. I’m not the most committed social media user but the EOS M50 does
make it easy to get images online. Connecting to the smart device was easy, using the Canon Connect app, and the connection was pretty stable. The camera can be set up to automatically transfer images as you take them over to your smart device using Bluetooth. For those who like using their smart device to shoot with (great for candids) the level of functionality was very good in terms of adjusting settings and using touch AF, but also press the virtual shutter release and there is minimal shutter lag, which makes timing much easier. To sum up, Canon’s latest mirrorlessmodel is a competent, well featured camera that works nicely and offers very good value.
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