Most Helpful Positive Review
Chris Winter
- BUILD QUALITY - So let’s first take a look at the build quality and design of the Canon 80d. Now Ive been testing the 80d out for a while now and felt comfortable using it pretty much straight away. That’s because the body itself isn’t changed that much from the old 70d, which his the camera I’ve used for 2 years or so. There are a few new things that have changed though. The buttons on the back of the camera are different and feel a lot easier to use. They’re a little bit more pronounced and this is nice. The grip itself is nice. It’s not a very heavy camera like the Canon 5d or 6d, but it’s also got enough weight on it to easily deal with a heavier lens like the Sigma 18-35mm that I also use. On the side of the camera you’ll also notice a new port, the headphone jack which is something I’ll talk about in a bit. But overall the build quality is fantastic, and to me is the sweet spot size for DSLR’s. - MENUS - Now when I first heard about the new Canon 80d, one thing I didn’t expect to change was the menu system. But it has. It’s now a little bit more compact and is using a new tabbed system rather than the old system. It’s taken me a little bit of time to get used to it but it does seem pretty easy. Fortunately it’s not too overloaded with options, especiaslly for beginners, but if you do put it in manual mode you do get a lot more options to play around wiht. - LCD SCREEN - Now one of the best features of the old Canon 70d was it’s touch screen and I’m pleased to say the Canon 80d is just as good. Because the Canon 80d has such fantastic autofocus, having the touch screen really makes things easy, especially if you want to do some nice focus pulls. I use this nearly overtime i make videos and it’s how I do those product focus pulls from time to time. Of course the 80d’s screen is also articulating and it’s something I couldn’t live without now. Being able to switch it around to any angel is great, especially for someone like me who films all my own videos. Its also a pretty big lcd screen, especially compared to a smaller camera like the Sony A6300 and that’s something I like. It’s deinfitely one of the best LCD screens I’ve ever used. - AUTOFOCUS - One thing that I’ve been incredibly impressed with on the new 80d is it’s autofocus performance. And to be fair I was a little bit sceptical at first. That’s because the Canon 70d’s dual pixel autofocus was so good. But Canon have seemed to have been able to make it quicker and a little bit more acurate. Especially using the LCD on the back. Its incredibly snappy autofocus and when you pair it up with one of the dedicated Canon lenses it really is impressive. I’ve even used it with my Sigma lenses, and it’s pretty consistent across the board. -VIDEO - Now the Canon 70d was one of the most popular video cameras over the last 2 years and for good reason. It’s dual pixel autofocus system was by far the best around. But it was lacking a few things. Firstly it could only shoot 60 frames per second in 720p. Now I’m not a huge fan of filming in 60p, but i was impressed with it. If you want to see a test video I made in 60frames per second, click the link here to see. I didn’t really expect the dual pixel autofocus to be any better than the 70d but it is. Which is pretty incredible. Being able to quickly pull focus using the touch screen is great and the face tracking works pretty well. It does have problems every now and then if you are wearing a hat or sunglasses though. To be fair, the Canon 80d is still lagging a little bit behind in terms of resolution. There are a lot of cameras that have 4k now and it would have been nice to see it included, but I didn’t expect it to be fair. Although it is still only 1080p thought the video quality was nice and I’ll definitely be upgrading to the 80d from my 70d for my future videos. - HEADPHONE JACK - One of my favorite new additions to the Canon 80d is a little inclusion on the side here, a headphone jack. This is something so basic that has been missing from a lot of Canon DSLR’s for so long and it’s great to see it in. Being able to really monitor your audio is huge and it’s worth the upgrade in itself. If you’re going to be filming a lot, then the 80d is definitely going to worst the upgrade.
