Jumping off the fence

quiquae wrote:

After a month of staring blankly at the sky asking myself whether I really wanted a full frame mirrorless, I decided this afternoon that I'd be more productive if I just bought one and stopped daydreaming about it. So here we go.

They had the camera and the 35mm lens in stock, but the lens hood was not! The bastards!

With the sun setting rather quickly, I had to go shoot without even bothering to read the manual, so this is not a review, just a first impression:

As much as I like the EF 35mm IS, I think I'm going to sell it now that I have the RF version. The bokeh seems very nice.

Is it really the case that there is no magnification focus support for unchipped manual lenses? This shot with the Samyang 14mm F2.8 was a royal pain in the butt!

APS-C crop seems OK, to the extent that a 13Mpx crop is OK, but dusk was not a very good time to test it, since the noise level when cropped feels like a 13Mpx APS-C camera, too. (In retrospect, this should not surprise anyone.) I'll have to try this again some other time.

One thing is for sure, this is not something you can just pick up and expect to be an expert at in five minutes just because you have experience with an older Canon camera. You actually have to sit down with the manual and try to make sense out of it.

You can get 5x and 10x magnification in the viewfinder or on screen with unchipped lenses. I use the swipe function of the M-Fn bar to control viewfinder magnification, the left hand end to toggle the histogram display and the right hand end to toggle the level display. That way I can leave the bar unlocked without getting any nasty surprises from touching it accidentally. I also have focus peaking on permanently as that doesn't work with lenses set to autofocus. I'm a bit disappointed that focus peaking doesn't work in magnified view (it does on the EOS M10) but that's not the end of the world.

I leave the focus aid permanently on as that disappears with lenses set to autofocus. It only works with chipped lenses as that's how the camera knows there's a lens actually mounted, but it even works with an f/16 catadioptric lens, which is amazing. It would be worth glueing a chip onto an unchipped EF mount lens just for that, if you can get one that doesn't confuse the camera.

The camera can use the rear screen for all sorts of controls, so coming to it in an EOS M frame of mind makes it a lot easier than treating it as a DSLR. I'm still coming to terms with the Fv mode where you use the rear wheel to determine whether the front wheel controls shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation or ISO and choose how many of those remain on AUTO. It promises to be very powerful.