Feb 26

Feb 26 Eos M-50: Canon’s Almost perfect Vlogging Camera

Canon has just announced the company’s newest mirrorless offering, the Eos-50. While Canon hasn’t exactly excited the photographic community with their previous mirrorless cameras, apparently they do sell well. The new Eos-m has some nice new features, including 4K video, which will have many Canon fans saying “finally”, although it does come with a lot of caveats. They have also changed the form factor slightly, and put a proper articulating screen on the camera, as opposed to the weird flip down model which was on the previous Eos M-5. While some people might scoff at this camera compared to those from Sony or Fuji, it does seem to be perfectly suited to the one market most other manufacturers seem to be ignoring: Vloggers. Well, almost perfect.

The camera includes many features making it ideal for Vloggers. It has a fully articulating screen and a microphone socket. Unlike previous mirrorless models from Canon, the screen flips out to the side and is no longer blocked by the microphone or a tripod (or gorilla pod). It also includes Canon’s superb dual-pixel autofocus. The addition of 4K would have made this perfect, were it not for some pretty big limitations. There is a significant crop over the existing APS-C crop, and it also doesn’t use dual-pixel autofocus when shooting 4k. This is a big let down, as it would have been perfect without these limitations. It would be very difficult to use this for Vlogging in 4k with these limitations (although still possible). However, most Vloggers would live with 1080 for vlogging.

This may sound like a deliberately neutered product, but the interesting thing here is the price. The EOS M-50 is relatively inexpensive. It will sell for $779 (Bhphoto) making it relatively cheap. While there are cheaper 4k options form Panasonic, this is still towards the low-end of the market, so while you could argue that the 4k crop is a big let down, it is somewhat understandable that there would be limitations for a relatively entry-level camera. I know Sony have managed to avoid using a crop, but I think that advantage is down to the processors used by Sony. I have said this in a post before, but Sony’s big advantage over other manufacturers is Sony’s experience in IC development. Their processors are clearly ahead of anyone else’s, with the possible exception of Panasonic.

Kai's hands-on Preview of the Eos M-50

What I find interesting is that Canon seems to be one of the few camera companies actively going after the Vlogger market. While some photographers and videographers might look down their nose at this segment, and the people who produce content in this segment is a massive potential market, and shouldn’t be ignored. While some idiots may have given the community a bad name recently, there is some great content out there being made, and the viewership numbers are staggering. Take Casey Neistat for example. He has 9 million subscribers. By comparison, the average viewership numbers for cable news networks in the US is around 2 million. Let that sink in for a minute.

There is a growing segment of content creators who want to make vlogs and similar videos, and if you look at the majority of the most famous ones, they are shooting with Canon mostly, and Panasonic second. As I said, I believe that this is a huge market, that is being untapped and mostly ignored by other manufacturers.

While the Eos M-50 is far from a perfect camera, I suspect that it will end up being a popular choice for Vloggers. Its form factor is ideal, being small and unobtrusive while having the features that are good enough for most Vloggers. It’s a real shame that they didn’t include proper, un-cropped downscaled 4k, as that would have made it perfect, but I still think that in the Vlogging community this camera will sell very well, especially for newcomers to the genre.