Switching from 7D to EOS M5

cdlk wrote:

I've owned my EOS M5 for 5 days now and I have joined this forum to share my experience (I'm afraid it's not been incredibly positive) in the hope people will find it useful. I'm kind of tempted to take up Canon's 14 day return policy, so I'd welcome opinions!

My Background
I started out with a 450D, then upgraded to a 7D which has been my main camera for 6.5 years and I get on well with it. I have a decent range of lenses, including a few Ls. I do mostly amateur personal photography, but I do the occasional paid job including video work.

On paper I really like the look of the EOS M5. It seemed like it'd be a decent upgrade in terms of resolution, AF performance, ISO performance, improved video support, and easier to carry around too! Probably my expectations were too high...

Cosmetic/Build

• The size and weight are fantastic. I picked the M5 up with the EF-M 22mm f/2 and this combination is light! You can chuck it in a hoodie/jacket pocket and take it anywhere.
• The EOS-M mount seems quite scratchy/jerky when fitting lenses. It works fine and feels solid once the lens is engaged, though.
• There is quite a lot of creaking around the camera grip - you hear plenty of creaking as you pick the camera up & as you shift your weight around the grip during normal use.
• Attaching a heavy lens like the 70-200 f/2.8 II works fine, though you'll probably want to support the camera a lot by the lens. This can make the controls more fiddly to use if you're concerned with putting too much strain on the mount.

Operation

• The shutter is not very strongly sprung. With my 7D I always shoot in continuous and take one photo, more if I want to; with the M5 I have to be really precise on the shutter to not take more photos than I intended. This leads to an awkward pressing motion of the button which adds camera shake. I'll probably get used to this, but it isn't very satisfying.
• The dials are quite stiff to turn - especially the exposure compensation dial. It is especially hard to use this whilst looking through the EVF - probably because the camera is so small it's hard to shift grip around to get a good purchase on the dials. This all means that quick adjustments are hard, so it's hard to react to quickly changing situations. Maybe this is also something I'd get better with.

Screen & EVF
[I realise some of this is probably general to all mirrorless cameras and electronic screens, but this may be useful for other DSLR users considering a switch to mirrorless]

• There's a very distinct lag when you put the EVF to your face - annoying if you want to immediately frame something that is happening.
• There's also a fairly long lag on both screens when the lighting conditions change until the metering catches up and shows you something you can see!
• In low light situations the EVF and screen both have a really awful framerate - it's unpleasant to look through and difficult to pick out any fine movements your subjects may be making. This FPS change is really sudden - dropping from silky smooth (it is really smooth in good light) to maybe sub 10 FPS.
• Reviewing photos on the EVF is both kind of neat and also kind of annoying. Sometimes I want to keep a subject framed and take a shot when it makes a certain movement so I found it weird having previews coming up in the viewfinder. In fairness the EVF only freezes for a moment, as long as you keep the shutter half pressed. Would be nice if you could turn on review but only display it if you take the camera away from your face and then it would be shown on the main screen.
• I think the options to control which screen to use are lacking. I configured M-Fn to manually switch screen between EVF and screen. But this only works during photo mode not review mode. So there's this annoying habit where I shoot with the EVF, forget to switch to rear screen, hit review to review on rear screen, argh can't change screen now, go back into photo mode, switch screen.. you get the idea.
• The sensor which detects your face for the EVF also detects any other objects! So if I stop shooting and drop the camera to my side, my leg/body activates the sensor over and over. This keeps the camera awake forever and switches the screens back and forth. Not good for battery so basically have to turn camera off entirely or use manual screen switching!
• The two screens don't seem very closely colour calibrated. The EVF gives a more rich, vibrant image, but reviewing the same shot on the rear screen is noticeably more dull

Focusing performance

• In decent light I am pretty sure I can see some benefit from the DPAF, though I can't say I was blown away by the AF speed.
• The smooth focusing for e.g. video use is very nice, and manual focus pulling with the touch screen is cool.
• Servo focus works a bit differently to with my 7D - if the M5 loses focus whilst you are taking pictures then it stops taking photos until it gets it back, so you don't get a consistent framerate and might miss a lot of shots if the camera struggles! Personally I'd prefer a full set of photos even if some won't be spot on.
• Low light focusing seems very poor. I was surprised at some of the conditions the M5 couldn't handle, so I grabbed a 400D which was lying around and sure enough this old thing focused better (I used the same lens, aperture & static subject)

ISO performance
This seems pretty decent and I'm happy with the results - much better than 7D. Low light performance feels worse than it is when you're shooting because the screens themselves are being amped up due to low light so they become very noisy.

Battery life
This is clearly just a thing with mirrorless cameras, and you'll probably say this is normal, but I was pretty shocked how fast I could drain a battery! It took less than 24 hours (in which time I shot 10 mins of video and 150 stills - no flash usage - but probably lots of flicking around menus). I was trying to be conservative and I set lowest possible screen timer and sleep timer. The battery dies pretty quickly after the first two bars have gone.

That's all I can think of right now. I hope this mini review is useful and would love to hear if others think I expected too much from the M5? (probably). Or maybe I've missed some setting that magically fixes some of these things! Maybe some of the above will be improved by future firmware but seems risky to chance it! Maybe having such an amazingly tiny package in the M5 + 22mm f/2 makes these gripes worth it?

I don't think the M5 is terrible, but I think it's perhaps at the wrong price point and probably not the right direction for me...

I think I would be better off with e.g. a 7DmkII and perhaps a cheaper M3 w/ 22mm f/2 as a second body if I want something tiny to carry around, which I won't expect the world from.

Cheers!

I think you would be better off with an 80D