Canon 70D - A 3 Month Review of the Canon EOS 70D by Gareth Davies

Photo by Gareth Davies

I upgraded to the Canon 70D from my 600D back in December. Most of the photography I do is of rugby games, so the 70D was the ideal choice - the 5D Mark III was too expensive and the 6D is not ideal for sports.

The biggest difference I found with the 70D was the focusing system.  The 19 point all cross type focusing system is wonderful - a big improvement over the 9 point with single cross type on the 600D.

The build quality of the camera is also very good. It's a lot sturdier than the 600D and it's a nice weight.

Since buying the camera I've photographed about 4 rugby games at my local amateur club where I'm really close to the action and a couple of public training sessions at Racing Metro, one of the leading clubs in the French Top 14. I now rarely have issues with the shots being out of focus - most of them are nice and sharp. I set it to use the centre focusing square which gives me the use of the 9 central focusing points. I use the Canon 70-200 f4 IS lens. The camera is really fast to focus and I rarely have problems tracking the players - in an average game I take maybe 700 photos, out of those maybe 5% having focusing issues, but most of these are when it was focused on the wrong player which is mostly down to myself trying to keep up with the play.

Canon 70D Focus Issues - User / Owner Report by Christian at Bonsai MultiMedia

Hi there,

I'm German and have had focus issues with my Canon 70D from the start. I'm one of the notorious testers and posters on one German forum and got a lot of heat for the whole discussion.

In short: The actual phenomenon only occurs under very particular circumstances. It can't be shown with test charts and/or under artificial light. I am able to show it with all of my lenses with apertures of f2.8 or wider.

Circumstances are:

- wide open lens, f1.0 - f2.8 (phenomenon instantly disappears from f3.2 onwards)
- phase AF via viewfinder only (or Quick AF mode in Live View)
- manual selection of the center AF field (instantly disappears when selecting any other field)
- small, distant objects that just fill the frame of the center AF field (at least 5-10m away, rather more).

The result are completely OOF images in the area where the focus should have been. The focus sometimes can be found very close to the camera instead of 100m away where the object was.