The Shallow End Of The In-Depth Review

This column will come to you far enough into the new year that we won't have to go over the old chestnut of New Year's Resolutions - and let's face it - we get enough resolution out of our lenses as it is. If the NYE party left you with a bit of residual chromatic aberration you'll know to take more water with it next time. In the vacuum of time between the major celebrations I checked a Canon mirror-less camera out of the shop stocks and had a close look at what this manufacturer has done to catch up to Olympus, Sony, and Fujifilm. I use the phrase advisedly, as I realise that company prestige is involved, but Canon Australia need not get angry at me - I have a number of good things to say about their product. The example I grabbed is the Canon EOS M6 kit with a silver body and a 15-45mm lens. It has stablemates in the mirror-less lineup - the M3 and the M5 with different characteristics. I chose this one because it has a dedicated LCD screen but no viewfinder in the kit - and I wanted to see whether it was a good proposition for someone working in a studio on product illustration. I'm currently loving the Fujifilm camera I have dedicated to this task, but the chance to compare and contrast came up... Today the ergonomics of the thing. The box is surprisingly small. That bodes well for a small camera - and bless the Canon people for making a package that you can actually get into without a chainsaw. And that tells you exactly what is inside. Bless them as well for a separate battery charger with a figure-of-eight kettle cord rather than a USB connector to the side of the camera. Makes charging easier. The camera body and lens are well-finished. This would seem to be a fatuous statement for Canon because all of their goods are so, but when you get a small tourist camera like this you really do want it to be a little gem rather than a lump. The silver is very appealing. The styling on the lens is equally so - with the knurling for manual focus and zoom being exceptionally crisp. Note that this knurled pattern extends to the shutter dial, thumb and forefinger dials, and the exposure compensation dial. You'll see from the close-up that their edges are beveled to fit neatly under the fingers without cutting in. Of course the lens extends forward for actual use and locks positively in place. I was most impressed with the decision of the lens designer to make it 15mm at the near end and to wind back the long end from the normal kit limit of 55mm. Quite frankly, for most of us a wide-angle lens is the more useful one - particularly if we intend to travel and capture landscape views. In my Little Studio I often make use of a 14mm Fujinon for tabletop shooting - the 15mm Canon feeding into a similar APS-C sensor is an excellent compromise. I must also add that the actual focusing was a breeze - even when I put the camera into manual and took control of the focus ring myself. But more of that tomorrow. On the other end of the optical chain, the LCD screen has a useful extension backwards and a not--so-useful extension upwards. Okay, okay, I'm biased...it actually is very useful if you are going to be taking selfies. I'm just allergic to selfists...They cause me to swell up and wheeze a lot. The screen does have a very effective touch-screen feature and I must say at the outset that it displays one of the easiest screens to manage in this mode. Even for someone coming fresh to the Canon menu format from another maker, the navigation is easy. In fact, the combination of manual exposure, auto focusing with screen pointing, and turning off the pre-visualisation was very nearly a perfect operational experience in the studio. You just looks down and there is the world spread in front of you. Okay - tomorrow the battery should be fully charged and we can start shooting something. Note: it's a small battery because the hand grip is small. The fact that the LCD screen is on all the time and you can request continuous focusing means that the juice will drain out of it fairly fast. Buy another battery or two...