Canon EOS M50 Full Review – Best Smallest Camera for Videos

The Canon EOS M50 is among the most praise beginner cameras for both photos and videos. With a small body, amazing autofocus, and 4K video recording, is this the upgrade you need?

Release in February 2018 at a launch price of GHc 4500 ($ 779). This camera, didn’t come cheap.

First things first, this camera is small. Like very small. It weighs 390g/0.86lb and For GHc 3500 or more, in some cases, you may feel cheated when it finally arrives. But, if you’re someone who has ever used or come across the Sony A6000 series, you wouldn’t be bother so much. At the top, it looks like most common DSLRs on the market. But, then again, this is a mirrorless camera, so let’s bare that in mind.

We get the hotshoe mount, the power switch, the mode dial, function, record and shutter button on top, with a strangely designed exposure control dial. This isn’t very common with most Canon cameras, but I believe with a smaller body like this, this design way the best choice they had.

It comes with a flip out 3-inch screen, which we’ll discuss later in this video.

On the right, is a mini HDMI port, a micro USB port and Wireless button and the mic input on the left. The bottom houses a ¼ inch mount, the card slot and battery compartment. On that note, it supports the SDXC cards which I would recommend you get a card that, at least supports 95MB/s read and write speed if you would be shooting at a high frame rate. The battery is also the LP-E12 lithium ion batteries, which is rated to take 235 shots per charge.

If you aren’t new to the channel, then you’ve probably heard me talking about how tiny my hands are. But even with those, this camera still feels small.

Even at this smaller size it still comes with a pop-up flash which you access by lifting up this lid, right here. I doubt anyone would want to use that though, but it’s there if you need it.

Since this is a mirrorless camera, it comes with an electronic viewfinder, it is place in a comfortable position which is more common. And if you wear glasses also, you can change up the clarity of the eyepiece, using this slider just beneath. There’s a 1 by 1 aspect ratio here, so no magnification when using the viewfinder. What you see is what you get.

The canon M50 comes with a 24MP APS-C sensor and it uses Canon’s EF-M mount system. But, getting a canon camera with the EF-M mount comes with some few comprises. One is, there aren’t many lenses to choose from. Only about a handful of them around. So, if you want to use both EF and EF-S lenses on this, you would need an additional Lens Adapter for like extra GHc 250 or so. And if you want to increase the capability of the crop sensor this comes with, then considering a speed booster is also an additional cost of about GHc 1000. So bare that in mind.

As mentioned, it comes with 3-inch swivel Touchscreen, which I love so very much. Added to the focusing speed of the camera, you just tab to focus. It’s that simple. And since, it’s fully articulatory, shooting YouTube videos with it, is a lot of fun. You can clearly see yourself, your background and adjust your framing accordingly.

The dual pixel autofocus system from Canon is present here and I’m sure you’ve heard enough hype about that already. And since the screen supports touch input, basically everywhere, you can just tab on the screen and get focus instantly whiles still being able to track subject with ease.

And for faces, you’re in luck. You would have no issues worrying whether you’re in focus or not. There’s also eye tracking which only shows up when your face is close enough to the camera. Once you are further away, it just switches to face tracking alone. Recording videos at 1080p works phenomenal, with this autofocus system. And here’s how it looks and sounds like.

As mentioned, the camera comes with an APS-C sensor which has a 1.6x crop factor. This means that, the 24mm lens I have here is still 24mm on full frame. But on this camera, it is multiplied by this 1.6 crop factor and becomes 38.4mm on this camera, so it’s a bit zoomed in.

Unfortunately, recording in 4K isn’t great. It comes with an additional 1.7x crop factor. So, this 24mm multiplied by 1.6 and then by another 1.7 gives us 65.28mm. another unfortunately thing with shooting 4K videos is the dual pixel auto focus doesn’t work so well. The camera struggles to detect the face and once it does, a slight back and forth movement, makes it focus hunt again.

Unlike, the Canon 600D review I did a while back, you don’t really always need someone behind the camera managing focus for you. But if you want to shoot in 4K, then it is a bit necessary. Gladly, this comes with focus peeking, so you’ll at least know once you nail focus. Note that, the maximum recording limit for this camera is 30 minutes, so, that’s another thing to keep an eye out for.

For photos, we get a resolution of 4000 x 6000px. Canon’s colour science is among the most praised ones in the camera industry, and I personally love them too. I still stand by they being a bit too magenta, but it’s still easy to correct in whatever photo editing app you may be using. The Digic 8 image processor also helps to improve the image quality and compression, so that’s another good thing. For landscapes and portraits, images look sharp, and I didn’t ever struggle with nailing focus in photos. It supports a maximum shutter speed of 1/4000s, up to 10 frames/s in single shot mode and up to 7 frames per second in servo mode (continuous focus mode). It is fast enough for what I would typically be using it for. Mostly, the time I would need that feature is when the couple is dancing or walking towards me during their exclusive photoshoot.

You can somewhat get away with a bit of sports photography or taking pictures of fast-moving subjects like kids playing or your dog fetching a ball, but not too intense.

With the inclusion of both wireless and Bluetooth connection, that’s weird Bluetooth is wireless. Anyway, with that inclusion, you get to use this alongside the Canon Camera Connect App, be able to control all your settings and record or take photos without ever touching the camera. Just, your is smartphone.

Again, since it has a smaller form factor, a continuous use of it is not too comfortable. I got the chance to shoot photos with this for an entire engagement day but, getting to the latter part, I started feeling a lot of pain between my middle and ring fingers. It isn’t longer and the grip isn’t deeper either so you can imagine. Still on the smaller body, we get a smaller battery too, so that’s another bummer.

Also, the placement of the card slot and battery so close to the bottom ¼ inch mount makes it impossible to reach them without taking off the quick release plate of say, a tripod first.

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