Canon EOS 650D review

The most significant developments in Canon’s last two consumer DSLRs have been all about the screen. The EOS 600D introduced a hinge, allowing shots to be framed from interesting angles, and now the 650D adds capacitive touch to the display.

The idea of a touchscreen display on a DSLR initially seemed about as much use an ashtray on a Harley Davidson. Yet it’s more than a shallow piece of gimmickry. Aside from making it easier to flick through and pinch-to-zoom on previously taken photos, the touchscreen makes it much simpler to deploy some of the more advanced controls.

It’s possible, for example, to use the touchscreen to choose from one of nine different focus points, which is much quicker than thumbing through the available options using the scroll wheel – especially if you’re shooting in live view, rather than with your eye pressed to the optical viewfinder. Likewise, it’s much quicker to choose from the myriad menu options on the 650D with the touchscreen, rather than shuffling along and down the various submenus using the camera’s D-pad.

It’s also possible to fire the shutter using the touchscreen. You tap on the screen to identify the subject of your photo, and as soon as the autofocus looks at your target, the shutter is fired. It’s literally point-and-shoot, and will certainly help to smooth the path for those upgrading to a DSLR from a compact or smartphone camera, although we found the focus wandered occasionally when shooting in this mode.

Talking of autofocus, that’s finally arrived in the 650D’s video-shooting mode. Whereas the 600D required the user to semi-depress the shutter button to force the camera to refocus on moving subjects, the 650D handles the job automatically – it did a fine job of keeping the subject in focus in our tests.

Better still, the jarring whine of the autofocus motor that marred videos shot with the 600D and its kit lens has been significantly reduced with the 650D. An external microphone socket allows videographers to ensure that no on-camera noise spoils their footage.

Indeed, autofocus performance appears to have improved markedly on the 650D across both stills and video. This is due to a new Hybrid AF system in which certain pixels are dedicated to the phase-detection AF commonly used in DSLRs, and others to the contrast detection system usually found in camcorders. Where the autofocus on both the 550D and 600D often struggled to keep up with fast-moving action, such as sports photography, the 650D was largely spot-on in our tests, even managing to keep a football being blasted straight towards the camera in focus.

Improved burst speeds help to capture moving targets, too. The DIGIC 5 processor – six times faster than the DIGIC 4 found in the 600D, according to Canon – boosts the continuous shooting rate from 3.7fps on the 600D to 5fps, for a maximum of 22 JPEGs or six raw images. Most of the core specs remain the same, however. The megapixel count is locked at 18mp, and the maximum ISO stays at 12800, although both remain perfectly respectable for a consumer-grade DSLR. In fact, the absence of noise even at ISO 6400 is seriously impressive – it’s certainly nothing that a quick wash through Adobe Lightroom won’t remedy.

There’s one area in which Canon could use a little feature trimming, though, and that’s the automatic shooting modes. Although video has now been shunted off the mode dial and becomes a third option on the power switch, there are still a faintly ridiculous 14 different shooting modes from which to choose. These include two newcomers: Handheld Night Scene and HDR Backlight Control. Both of these modes take multiple exposures – four and three respectively – that are automatically blended in-camera to cope with high-contrasts scenes and retain detail in low-light conditions. Both proved only mildly effective in our tests; they’re no match for merging images in dedicated software.

There’s little fault to be found when it comes to build quality. The right-hand grip and articulated screen make it easy to hold the camera steady when shooting either stills or video; and the buttons and dials are sensibly laid out, with room for a dedicated ISO button. Our only quibble is the sturdiness of the buttons themselves, which feel very lightweight under the finger and below Canon’s usual levels of durability. At least the touchscreen provides a backup means of navigating the menus should those buttons ever fail.

Those minor concerns aside, we’re won over by the EOS 650D. The touchscreen makes an enormous difference to the operation of the camera, helping to quickly find key settings in a hurry and introducing a new way of taking photos with a DSLR. The improvements to the autofocus, meanwhile, bring Canon’s consumer DSLRs up to speed with its rivals when it comes to videography, and vastly improves your chances of capturing fast-moving action when taking stills. All in all, we don’t think there’s a better all-round entry-level DSLR on the market.

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