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Home / Reviews / Cameras / System Cameras / Canon EOS 80D review

Canon EOS 80D review

Imagine a camera that does all the hard work for you. Well, Canon's only gone and made one

Ask the experts and they’ll tell you that photography is all about light.

They’re right, of course, but focus is pretty damn important too – and that’s why Canon’s new EOS 80D is one of the best cameras we’ve used in ages.

Simply put, the 80D gives you such advanced focusing tools that you’ll be hard-pushed to get an out-of-focus shot with it. Add to that the fact that it takes big, detailed stills, excels with video, has built-in Wi-Fi and NFC and comes packed with an array of other features and you have a compelling all-round package. 

Focus pocus

The first thing you’ll realise once you start shooting with the 80D is that there are loads of ways to focus it. There are four main modes – you can let the camera choose one of the 45 focus points for you, select any one of them yourself, or let it focus within either large or small zones of your choice.

It might all seem a little bewildering at first, especially if you’re not used to system cameras, but the good news is that whichever mode you select you’ll probably get great shots. That’s because the 80D has an incredibly sophisticated autofocus system: all 45 points are the ultra-sensitive cross-type and you’ll find that it locks on swiftly and accurately even in fairly dim conditions.

The various modes come into their own when shooting moving subjects, with the zone focusing in particular doing a great job of tracking a subject. I spent some time snapping pictures of my kids playing football in the garden and was pleasantly surprised at how great they were – anyone with kids usually accepts a fair few blurry shots among the crisp ones, but here they were few and far between. It’s a fairly fast camera for a mid-range DSLR, too, shooting bursts of up to 7fps with a decent buffer of 25 RAW files or 110 JPEGs.

While the average punter will just pick it up, start shooting and break out in a grin when they see the results, there’s plenty here for specialists to get their teeth into too. The AF system can be comprehensively customised, with the ability to adjust the sensitivity and speed in all manner of ways. I wouldn’t advise messing around with it unless you know what you’re doing but it’s good to know you have the option.

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If I was delighted with standard AF then I was gobsmacked by the 80D’s Live View performance. Not that long ago Live View on DSLRs was only really useful for stills, but Canon has ushered in massive improvements and the 80D sets new once more.

Profile image of Marc McLaren Marc McLaren Contributor

About

Marc was until fairly recently Editor of Stuff.tv, but now edits a site about cars instead. He has been a committed geek since getting a Tomytronic 3D aged seven, and a journalist since the week that Google was founded (really). He spends much of his free time taking photos of really small things (bugs, flowers, his daughters) or really big things (galaxies and the like through a telescope) and losing games of FIFA and Pro Evo online. You can email Marc at marc.mclaren@haymarket.com