EOS-M3 two steps ahead, and around 2.5 steps back.

As most of you are aware I was eagerly anticipating the M3's pending arrival and even ordered from Japan (and dragged a bunch of you along with me).

Just picking up the M3 out of the box when it arrived in my hot little greedy hands, I knew something was amiss.

Gone was that SOLID brick feeling of the M, and now we have a more rebel like feel to the camera.

Thinking to myself, well that is not to bad, I'll get used of it; one starts to go through the settings, the features and find out what you can and can't do with it.

First of all; the two steps ahead is the tilting view capability of both the EVF and the LCD. I find me using the EVF continually at the 45 to 70 degree mark, and shooting the M like a old medium format camera, with it down below my head and me looking down into the EVF or LCD. this is also really good when you have photochromatic glasses, since they lighten up a bit when you look down away from the sun, whereas if you are looking straight ahead they dim.

The AF I find is a mixed bag, in some cases I find it much snappier and far more better such as with my EF-S 60mm macro and other times, especially in low light, it simply isn't as responsive as the M. for macro AF it's night and day better than the M. Just no comparison.

Colors out of the M3 (I shoot RAW) I find are very malleable and the output from either LR or DPP with the EF-M lenses is simply wonderful.

If you don't do any significantly difficult shooting, and just want a travel snap camera, there's really nothing ILC better for the price including the lenses than an M3 kit and the three zooms. Period.

When the 11-22mm is sharp corner to corner at 100% on a 24MP sensor - you know canon created something just a bit special.

Battery life - I do have to admit, I'm not that worried about - it actually seems relatively decent.

However, we have the stumbles and the steps backward.

By all appearances, this is brand new firmware. Drastically different from any other EOS system to date; prone with some noted compatibility issues and most importantly some features and functionality that just don't work as well as it used to.

1. AWB "flickers" I can half shutter press and watching the back LCD, see and watch the white balance change.. An annoyance for sure, but i always wonder what would happen if i pressed the shutter button before AWB calmed the heck down. it's something that you just need to watch for. less of an issue for RAW users of course.

2. AEB. I have never had a camera so useless at shooting AEB in my life. Period. approximately 1 second in between shots even in full manual exposure, and AF modes. This is simply inexcusable for an ILC camera. Unless you are shooting AEB for architecture or stills this camera cannot do HDR via RAW at all. Period. End stop.

3. Feel - just something doesn't feel as good as the M did.

4. Missing features that just simply annoy the daylights out of me:

- can't set upper limit to Auto ISO,
- can't set the mFunc button to a wide range of features, but instead a pretty small subset.
- Cannot seem to turn off EFCS (important for over 1/1000 shutter speeds)
- No EyeFi card support
- 10 second timer can no longer take 1-10 exposures (or in the case of with AEB, 1 to 10 bracketed sets - damn this was so useful!)

5. What the blazes happened to the most user friendly and interactive touchscreen in the industry??!

6. if you make a change to the settings and open the battery / card door - you lose all settings since the last time you powered off the camera. the firmware developer that thought of this logic should be tarred and feathered.

Conclusions.

A step forward in some features that some may want from the original M, however if you find 18Mp just fine, and you like the way the M acts and reacts to you and canon's "intent" with the M - then you will be disappointed with the M3.

The image quality is simply gorgeous, I'll be adding images into this thread especially after this coming weekend, however from my testing if you are just a single shot shooter, you don't bracket, you don't HDR and you don't necessarily need a super responsive camera, the M3 gives you all you could want.

Otherwise, I suggest waiting until there's a major firmware release - or the M4 probably due out this december or so and at least this time, waiting for reviews to see if canon actually listened to the complaints about the M3 and took a few steps forward and none back.