Canon EOS M50

Synchronous swimming:

Finally today I was able to give the M50 a test drive. Generally I am happy with it, but here are a few observations.

The camera has a long afte-shutter delay. It takes a shot, and then the viewfinder goes black for about half a second. Fortunately it is not a shutter release delay common for P&S cameras.

Ergonomics: I kept pressing the Menu button in the bottom right corner with the heel of my palm. Very annoying.

I decided to try it with the 70-200 f/4 IS lens. First I had to turn off the IS, it was not stopping, working all the time. While the in-comers IS was working, it seemed not as good as the lens’s.

Not comfortable with even not very long lens such as the 70-200. The whole set is front heavy. It is better suited with smaller lenses without the adaptor (I have one by Canon, bought it on sale for $50).

It was a bright sunny day with plenty of sparkling white snow on the ground, so I had to wear polarized sunglasses. The viewfinder looked uncomfortably dark. Not impossible to shoot, but still I had to strain my eyes. Not an issue without sunglasses.

But I still want to stress that in general I did like the camera. Small, lightweight, great for travel. Taking it to Paris next week with its kit 18-45.

One of the coop girls. Photo taken by shooting through the fence.

M50

A whitetail deer from this afternoon.

Just got back from Joshua Tree with the family. It was wifeys bday so I said I would make her a nice video. Obviously all shot with the M50.

Very nice.

I came across this very useful feature purely by accident, and I cannot find any mention of it in the (useless) manual. If anyone knows what it’s called or where it’s documented, then let me know please as I’d love to know if the EOS R does the same.

Press the * button to focus, but DON’T release the button. The lens focuses as you’d expect, but if whilst still holding down the * button you manually adjust focus on the lens, the camera switches to MF override and rather wonderfully the display or EVF will switch to x10 magnification centred on the AF point. The MF override is obviously a known entity, but the "auto zoom" by the method stated above doesn't appear to be documented AFAIK.

For this feature to work, I have the * button on the back assigned to “Metering and AF start” aka BBF, with the shutter button set as “Metering start” only, the focus mode set to one-shot AF, continuous AF turned off, with single point focus mode. I am also using a native EF-M mount lenses – it doesn’t seem to work when I use the M to EF adaptor with most of my EF/EF-S lenses (incl. Canon), although the newer EF-S 18-135 IS USM Nano from my 80D does enable the feature on the M50 when used via the EF mount adaptor. I guess it’s only newer release Canon lenes that support it? (ret).

neihn wrote in post #18836909
Very nice.

Thank you!

m50

Practicing my BIF shots.
This common species is native to the Southwest, but in recent years has greatly expanded its range:

I only own this body because I needed something really small to carry along when I'm fishing. I think it will be fine for that, but coming from a 5DIV (which I sold with the intention of getting the slightly smaller and lighter R for my aging hands) this thing has me wanting to pull my hair out (good thing I just got a haircut)!!

I've upgraded the firmware to the latest. Being sick of finding the focus point in a corner of the frame when I bring it to my eye for a really quick shot, I chose "disable the touch screen focus" option. Now, one would think that doing so would actually disable the ability of moving the focus point on the screen with your finger, intentionally or not. NO!! It's still active.
In order to disable it I have to disable the entire touch screen capabilities of the camera. Not an option, obviously.

On top of that, it's getting really old and frustrating to try to grab a fleeting action shot and have the camera just freeze-- even though I have the subject selected, it will refuse to focus, refuse to fire, until the moment (and there have been many) has quickly passed. Sorry for the rant, but I sure hope I won't experience this when I drop 3 large on my next real Canon body...