Canon 70D Review (Canon EOS 70D)

At first glance, the new EOS 70D looks like its predecessor, the 60D, which it is now replacing. But with the Canon 70D, Canon brings together a few features that were previously reserved for other models. For example the touch screen from the EOS 700D, the WiFi functions of the EOS 6D or the AF module of the EOS 7D. In addition, there is a completely new procedure for autofocus in live mode and for video recordings. Is that enough for a good mid-range DSLR that leaves nothing to be desired? We have investigated this question in extensive practical use, as follows.

Short evaluation

Pros

• WiFi connectivity
• Very fast phase autofocus and extremely short shutter release delay
• High and long-lasting continuous shooting rate
• Robust housing with very good handling

Cons

• No autofocus auxiliary light (flash volley only)
• Somewhat limited dynamic range (due to crisp image tuning)
• Not completely neutral colour rendering
• Live View autofocus slow.

With the EOS 70D, Canon introduced a semi-professional mid-range DSLR that has been widely improved over its predecessor. The EOS 70D now has the same AF module as the 7D, with 19 sensors, all of which are designed as cross sensors. In Live View mode, the EOS 70D focuses with a phase AF on the image converter, which Canon calls “Dual Pixel CMOS AF”. This technology has been improved to such an extent that the Live View AF now covers around 80 percent of the image field and functions down to luminous intensity F11. According to Canon, it should focus up to five times faster than the contrast-autofocus and thus quickly adjust the sharpness during video shooting or Live View operation.

Canon has improved the viewfinder of the 70D: Its pentaprism viewfinder covers approx. 98 percent of the image field (at 0.95x magnification), while its predecessor only covered 96 percent. The 3-inch display can still be rotated and swivelled, but now also functions as a touchscreen that also recognizes multitouch gestures. The display has a fine resolution of 1.04 million pixels and is supposed to be very bright thanks to “ClearView II” technology.

With the EOS 70D, Canon has increased the sensor resolution to a good 20 megapixels, and ISO 25,600 can be selected as the highest sensitivity level. As Canon points out, the 70D is equipped with a large buffer memory that allows long continuous shooting rates. At a maximum frame rate of 7 frames per second, the camera should record up to 65 JPEG or 16 RAW photos before the continuous advance speed drops. A “DIGIC 5+ processor” with 14-bit signal conversion, which is also used in the EOS 5D III top model, is responsible for the internal image processing.

The EOS 70D inherits the WiFi module from the EOS 6D. It enables fast image transfer to a mobile device, if this is equipped with a corresponding app, the 70D can also be remote controlled. Near Field Communication (NFC) obviously does not master the EOS 70, at least Canon makes no statement about it. The 70D films in full HD resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels) with a maximum frame rate of 30p.

The integrated microphone records the sound in stereo. The on-board flash (guide number 12) can be used as a control flash for a wireless flash setup. The EOS 70D has an automatic HDR function for particularly high-contrast scenes and offers the option of multiple exposure of up to nine shots. Compared to its predecessor, Canon has only moderately revised the body of the EOS 70D, it weighs 755 grams ready for use (but without lens) and is protected against splash water and dust.

Ergonomics and Workmanship

The Canon EOS 70D is a revolution under the hood. Externally, it is practically the same as its predecessor, the EOS 60D. Like all DSLRs from Canon, it lies extremely well and firmly in the hand, which is certainly due to the very pronounced handle and the well-shaped thumb rest. Even if you put your foot down firmly, you won’t notice that the EOS 70D’s case is made of plastic – there’s nothing to groan and clatter about!

The camera is pleasantly small, but not exactly a lightweight gear. Ready for operation and equipped with the set lens EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM it weighs almost one kilo. Canon has used virtually every free space on the top and back of the camera to accommodate a button, dial or switch. This makes operation much easier because there is a dedicated control element for every important camera function. Most of them can be operated blindly, even if the camera is only held with one hand. Unfortunately, this does not apply to the speed dial typical for Canon, it simply sits too low on the back of the camera and is therefore difficult for the thumb to reach.

Responsible for this somewhat unfavourable position of the important control element is the generously dimensioned display. Not only does it have a very fine resolution of over one million pixels, it also shines brightly enough in the midday sun. Canon has it hinged to the left of the case with a sturdy hinge so the monitor can be placed in virtually any position. In Live View mode, you can take pictures even from unusual perspectives without the photographer having to dislocate himself. As with the EOS 700D, the display of the EOS 70D is also touch-sensitive.

More than a dozen parameters can be changed with a few fingertips, if desired the camera even displays a short help text for the currently selected function. This gives the “Menu” button long pauses, the main menu hardly needs to be called in everyday photography.

That’s good, because the menu is so full of commands and options that you can almost get lost in it. The program selector wheel of the EOS 70 in the upper left corner of the screen has been cleaned out by Canon: Individual scene mode programs can no longer be selected via it, the quick menu is now responsible for this. However, this is not a broken leg, especially as the selector wheel no longer has an end stop and can be turned through. Incidentally, it can hardly be accidentally adjusted, the program selector runs very tightly and is additionally secured by a lock button.

Although the EOS 70D comes with respectable Live View features, it is first and foremost a classic digital SLR camera with optical viewfinder.

The viewfinder image is pleasantly bright thanks to an elaborate pentaprism construction, but somewhat small – which is typical for a DSLR with sensor in APS-C format. In addition, Canon has designed the eyepiece in such a way that spectacle wearers can also see the entire viewfinder image.

All in all, the optical viewfinder looks quite high-quality and offers hardly any cause for criticism. Unfortunately, this does not apply to all interface covers. While the memory card slot on the right side still disappears under a sturdy flap with a neat spring hinge, the HDMI, USB and microphone sockets on the left have to be covered with sleek rubber plugs. This seems a little unloving, but fulfils its purpose in everyday life. According to Canon, the EOS 70D defies the unpleasantness of the weather, a rain shower cannot harm it. The powerful battery is sufficient for a good 900 shots (according to CIPA standard) and is inserted from below.

Canon has cleverly attached the lid for the battery compartment so that it can be opened even when the tripod plate is attached. The tripod thread is arranged neatly in the optical axis, so nothing stands in the way of exact panorama shots.

Equipment

No matter whether the photographer is still a novice, an experienced amateur or a demanding professional – the EOS 70D tries to please everyone. And she’s doing it very well. The automatic Scene Recognition function, in which the camera regulates everything independently, makes it easy to take pictures. If you want a little more control over what’s happening, choose the creative automatic. In this mode you can set a picture style (from “Standard” to “Living” to “Monochrome”) and influence the depth of field via the aperture selection. The EOS 70D adapts even more precisely to the photographer’s wishes when he specifically specifies one of the ten motif programs. Here, too, image styles can be specified entirely according to taste. The EOS 70D also offers various effect possibilities from “grainy black-and-white” to “miniature effect” – directly during recording only in live mode, much more comfortable then in playback mode.

Even though Canon has equipped the EOS 70D with plenty of automatic functions for carefree photography, the camera is clearly also aimed at demanding photographers. Thus, the exposure control hardly misses anything. Whether program, aperture or aperture automatic, manual exposure control or a maximum exposure compensation of +/- 5EV – the EOS 70D has it all on board. In addition, it has an automatic function that immediately saves three differently exposed shots as an image with extended dynamic range. Clever: Whether the camera should compensate for an offset of the individual shots or not can be pre-set. Another great feature is that the EOS 70D offers a mirror lock-up – so the mirror blow does not lead to blurred shots.

The autofocus with 19 measuring fields isn’t exactly lavishly equipped, but it’s quite sufficient. Much more important than the sheer number of measuring fields is their arrangement. And Canon does everything right, the AF fields cover a very large area of the viewfinder image and also capture subjects near the edge of the image. In Live View mode, a viewfinder magnifier can be switched on to display a section in either 5x or 10x magnification, thus facilitating manual focusing. However, the EOS 70D lacks a function that emphasizes contrast edges in the focus plane (focus peaking).

In practice, the autofocus proved to be very fast (more on this in the lens section), but in image series it sometimes lost an action scene from the focus. No wonder, since the EOS 70D starts sprinting at 6.8 frames/second (fps) when recording in raw and hardly less slowly at 6.7 fps for JPEG photos. One notices that Canon has equipped the EOS 70D with a generously dimensioned buffer memory: It takes a good 30 JPEG photos and at least 15 raw shots before the serial frame rate breaks down. Or to put it another way: The EOS 70D maintains its high speed in JEPG series for almost five seconds – a respectable performance for a camera in its class!

Less nice is the fact that the EOS 70D does without an AF auxiliary light. Instead, their on-board flash fires an obtrusive flurry of flashes on demand if the ambient light is not sufficient. By the way, the integrated flash is quite potent with its guide number 13 and is completely sufficient in many situations. Up to date is the EOS 70D with its short flash sync time of 1/250 s and a function to store the flash exposure. It is also very nice that the flash sync time can be limited to a range between 1/60 s and 1/250 s – this avoids motion blur or blurred shots, which is quite possible with long-term sync. By the way, the EOS 70D can unleash external flash units, the control of the wireless flash setup is then taken over by the on-board flash.

For videographers, the EOS 70D has many a treat in store. For example, the possibility to level out the sound manually. Or a wind filter for the integrated stereo microphone. For high-quality sound recordings, a socket is available for connecting an external microphone. Video professionals will also be pleased that the EOS 70D records timecodes. Canon has equipped the EOS 70D with a completely new type of on-sensor phase AF (more on this in the “Lens” section), which shows off its advantages impressively in video recordings: The camera smoothly adjusts the focus during shooting, there is no hint of focus pumping. In addition, the focus drive of the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens is completely silent.

The EOS 70D is generous when it comes to editing photos and videos afterwards. Raw images in the camera can be converted into JPEG files, while the internal image processing offers a whole bunch of options. These become important at the latest when recordings are to be published or passed on quickly. The EOS 70D does this wirelessly, by the way; the camera is equipped with a WLAN function. It not only sends recordings to another device on the network, but also allows remote control of the camera via the “EOS Remote” app (available for Android and iOS).

Lens

Canon offers the EOS 70D in a set together with the lens Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM. It’s no coincidence that Canon has set this lens aside for the camera in the set: the abbreviation STM in the name stands for stepping motor and describes the type of focus drive. It smoothly and virtually noiselessly adjusts the focus of video shots, while also offering clear advantages for photo shoots. Canon has equipped the EOS 70D with a completely new type of on-sensor phase AF. Previous methods for determining the distance between the motif and the image sensor using a phase comparison method used special photodiodes which do not record any image information. Of the many millions of sensor cells, some 1,000 or even 10,000 are virtually blind, and the missing image information is supplemented by interpolation.

 

Canon has now come up with something very special: the “Dual Pixel CMOS AF”. A sensor cell consists of two photodiodes, which the autofocus can read out separately. In simplified terms, only the left photodiode of one sensor cell is read out for focusing, while the right photodiode is read out for the counterpart. The photodiode pairs are then connected together for the actual image acquisition. Advantages of this procedure: No image information is lost, resolution-reducing interpolation is not necessary with the EOS 70D. In addition, Canon has equipped around 80 percent of the sensor surface with these double cells, so the autofocus obtains its information from a very wide image field. According to Canon, the “Dual Pixel CMOS AF” currently works with 103 out of 156 EOS-EF lenses, but only the STM lenses focus silently.

But all theory is grey. How well the new AF procedure works can only be seen in practice and of course in the test laboratory.

And even with the STM lens in Live View mode, the AF can’t pull out straight trees – at least not in the camera’s default settings. It takes about 1.3 seconds to focus from infinity to a distance of two meters, both at the shortest focal length of 29 millimeters (all data related to 35mm) and at the long end of the telephoto lens. However, the sheet turns when you switch off the face recognition active by default and specify as small an AF-measurement field as possible. Then the shutter release delay, including autofocus, drops to around 0.93 seconds at all focal lengths.

This is still not very fast, but for the Live View AF from Canon it means a noticeable progress. It is a pity, however, that the Live View AF does not adjust the sharpness during continuous shooting. Instead, the EOS 70D freezes the distance setting on the first frame of the series.

The fact that the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM was slightly under the price dictate can be seen in the lens, but its plastic tube doesn’t look cheap at all. Only the bayonet should have been made of metal, the plastic connection does not necessarily inspire much confidence in its longevity. Canon didn’t cut back on the equipment: the set lens of the EOS 70D is equipped with an optical image stabilizer that proved to be effective in practice and can be deactivated with a slider on the lens. And thanks to its minimum focus distance of only 25 centimeters, the light zoom achieves a remarkable maximum magnification of 1:3.6.

Image Quality Of The Canon 70D

Canon has equipped the EOS 70D with a completely new sensor, which now resolves 20.2 megapixels instead of 18.0 megapixels as with the EOS 60D. This slightly reduces the pixel pitch from 4.3 to 4.1 microns. In theory, this should have little effect on noise behaviour and resolution. The EOS 70D had to show whether this is the case in the hard course through the test laboratory of digitalkamer.de. As always, the very detailed and extensively commented test protocol can be viewed for a small fee and downloaded as a PDF file (see further links at the end of this article).

As a partner, the EOS 70D was supported by the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens in the laboratory test, with which the camera is also offered in a reasonably priced set. The resolution of this lens is remarkably high. At optimal aperture it resolves F5.6 in wide angle as well as at normal focal length around 50 line pairs per millimeter (lp/mm), at longest telephoto focal length it stays only little below – respect! The loss of resolution towards the edges of the image is also still limited to around 20 percent. However, the EOS 70D achieves this high detail rendition through somewhat strong resharpening, the sharpness artifacts are a little high with a maximum rate of 15 percent.

The camera has chromatic aberrations firmly under control, colour fringes on contrasting edges can only be seen at the edges of wide-angle photos. A glance at the raw images reveals that this is less a merit of the optics than of the internal lens correction: Here you can see some strong color fringes, but today’s raw converters can correct them well.

The vignetting is also unproblematic, the image corners are reproduced only -0.5 EV darker than the center. This should also be due to the internal lens correction. An image defect that the EOS 70D cannot correct is distortion. And promptly the lens shows a clear weakness here in the wide-angle range: at the shortest focal length, the zoom shows a strong barrel shape of 2.5 percent – making it less suitable for architectural photos.

The EOS 70D takes a very pleasant route when it comes to detail reproduction and noise reduction. The signal-to-noise ratio decreases continuously from the basic sensitivity ISO 100. Only from ISO 1.600 on does the noise suppression intervene massively and stop the decline at an acceptable 34 dB. Correspondingly, Canon is increasing luminance noise up to ISO 1,600, but it remains uncritical up to ISO 3,200. Many manufacturers reduce noise more radically even at low ISO levels – with often unwanted side effects. However, the EOS 70D’s restrained tuning of the noise reduction system benefits the visual image impression: the very fine grain is by no means disturbing and even helps to increase the visual impression of sharpness through dithering effects. Therefore it does not disturb that the texture sharpness also decreases continuously from ISO 100. However, the corresponding measurement also shows that the EOS 70D sharpens very strongly by default – fortunately, this can be changed via the image style. Apart from that, the camera delivers a good to very good result up to ISO 6,400 in the test laboratory – and the images can also fall up to this sensitivity.

The EOS 70D is not quite as confident when it comes to contrast reproduction and exposure. A slight tendency towards overexposed shots cannot be denied – but this can also be corrected with a single movement of the hand before the shot is taken. Canon has tuned the EOS 70D’s tone curve quite crisply – similar to the sharpening. Although this results in an appealingly powerful image impression, there is hardly any room for manoeuvre left for the subsequent processing of the images. But if you value it, you should better record in raw format anyway. By the way, this saves you from another peculiarity of the EOS 70D: it doesn’t take it too seriously with the lifelike color reproduction. Especially red and violet tones saturate it very strongly, which gives the shots a very individual look.

Conclusion

With the EOS 70D Canon delivers a DSLR of the upper middle class, which is all around successful and has only few weaknesses. Its Dual Pixel CMOS AF significantly improves AF performance in Live View and video recording, without even approaching the AF speed of good mirrorless systems. As a classic DSLR, the EOS 70D convinces with its good handling, a very high continuous shooting rate and fast autofocus.

The scope of equipment is immense, the workmanship impeccable. There is hardly any reason left to go for the nominally even higher quality EOS 7D. However, the internal image processing of the EOS 70D is not convincing in all respects. On the plus side, it has an almost analogue noise reduction tuning that is very restrained and provides visually appealing picture results. By contrast, the tonal curve is very strongly tuned, and the EOS 70D is overzealous when sharpening.

The color rendering of the EOS 70D also has to take some criticism, as other cameras in its price class are more neutral. The EOS 70D is a classic workhorse that can effortlessly master practically any shooting situation for those who overlook it or photograph in raw format. This even applies to a large extent to the price-optimized set lens, which is only not convincing in terms of “distortion”.

Short evaluation

• WiFi connectivity
• Very fast phase autofocus and extremely short shutter release delay
• High and long-lasting continuous shooting rate
• Robust housing with very good handling

• No autofocus auxiliary light (flash volley only)
• Somewhat limited dynamic range (due to crisp image tuning)
• Not completely neutral colour rendering
• Live View auto focus slow