Canon C70 - A great camera but not without its quirks.
It’s always exciting getting new kit, we spend months and months reading reviews, comparing specs - but without getting your hands on a camera it’s impossible to truly tell if it will work for you and your clients.
This quick test film was shot in a couple of hours to very quickly gather some sample footage of the Canon C70 so we could get to grips with the footage this camera produces. Luckily we had a clear, bright day despite it being the middle of winter here in the UK when this was shot. This gave us an excellent chance to test the 16+ stops of dynamic range Canon claims this camera can capture.
It shares the same incredible DGO sensor as the C300 MkIII, but crammed into a much smaller, lighter body. Making it much easier to transport, carry, operate over long periods of time and also mount on to a smaller gimble with relative ease. It also features the new RF mount which means it can accept the RF lenses we have invested in for use on my EOS R5, R6 and RED Raptor. But, the one reason we have been most excited about is the Canon Mount Adapter EF-EOS R 0.71X focal reducer. Essentially a speed booster, this adapter increases the light transmission by one whole stop, it also provides the same angle of view as if using a full frame sensor. When coupled to the C70, it means the CN-E 50mm T1.3 appears more like a 36mm lens on a S35mm sensor. The C70 registers the f stop value to be F0.9, which is absolutely bonkers.
I need to state now though, as with all cameras, the C70 is not perfect. Firstly, the lack of SDI output is a real killer. HDMI is fine, but it's just not a professional connection. It's not nearly as solid and reliable as SDI and even with a right angle HDMI cable, the plug sticks out awkwardly and it feels like it could quite easily get knocked and damaged. Side note; the camera does have SDI for timecode, but it cannot be used as an output source - why oh why didn't they make this a Timecode/SDI output that can be toggled in the menu? Or instead of HDMI, give us SDI output? But I guess this issue can be worked around with USB powered HDMI to SDI conversion box from the likes of Black Magic Design.
The control joystick is horrible. I don't know if its just an issue with my specific model, but sometimes you click the joystick and it just doesn't respond, then suddenly it'll jump two or three places in the menu on your next press. My C200 control stick is better and that camera is getting long in the tooth now.
I had to buy a small rig plate for the top, because with the exception of a cold shoe, it has no mounting points anywhere on the camera. Not even on the included handle. Come on Canon, if this is a 'Cine' camera then you should know professional camera operators need to attach accessories to their cameras, always. And a cold shoe is just useless to us.
But the biggest concern - This camera uses SD Cards for whatever reason. Perhaps to keep the reader size down and fit it into the hand grip of this tiny camera body. But the fact it uses SD Cards means that will always been the performance bottleneck. That's why the camera cannot record Cinema Raw Light, the data rate would be just high for SDXC. But that's okay, because it records in the amazing Canon XF-AVC 422 10bit codec which produces nice sized, easy to manage, good to work with, excellent quality footage - if you want Raw, get the C300 MkIII.
Now, Canon make it fairly clear that you need V60 cards for some footage, but the highest quality 4K footage and 4K 120p needs v90 cards to cope with the data rate and frames per second. I did some reading and according the Canon website, the Anglebird 128GB v90 cards have been verified to work with the camera without issue. So, you can imagine my concern and frustration when I constantly got the error message 'Buffer overflow. Recording was stopped.' and the camera just completely crashing and locking up to the extent that I needed to shut the camera down and boot it back up again.
I have ordered some of the Sony Tough SDXC cards which I have read work perfectly with the C70, despite not actually being on Canon’s 'verified' list and I'm going to see how that goes - because if this issue can be sorted I can see myself loving this camera - the image is incredible from the DGO sensor, it's form factor works very well for a number of applications and the camera is actually a joy to use once you work around the rubbish joystick. I’m hoping and praying these new Sony cards fix this silly gripe because apart from that, Canon have created a truly remarkable camera in what seems like an impossibly small package.
Check back soon for an update on this. I'm also going to be reaching out to Canon for their help and support.
