Canon EOS M6 Mark 2 Review | The Best Camera I’ve Ever Owned
Previously I did a video about the worst camera
I'd ever owned, that's the camera this video is being recorded on – the GoPro 9. Let's just hope
it doesn't freeze up before the end of the video. Today I'm going to do another video about the best
camera I've ever owned – the Canon EOS M6 Mark ii. I don't usually do videos about digital cameras
because they don't normally stay relevant for very long. These old film cameras stay relevant
for years, you know, this one's 40 years old and people are still interested, but with
digital cameras new ones come out so frequently and once a new model comes out then people
aren't generally interested in the old model. But this is such a great camera, and
it's about two and a half years old now, that I've decided to do this video.
I'll
just give you a quick sort of history of my camera background. So, in 1981 it was a Canon
A1 film camera and I upgraded to a Canon T90. In 2000 I got a very early Sony digital camera,
it was a point and shoot, as a present and used that for a while. In 2004 I bought
my first digital SLR, it was a Canon 10D, then I moved up to this one, a Canon
40D. In 2013 I moved to an EOS M, 2017 I got an EOS M6 and I've just upgraded
to the EOS M6 Mark 2. The problem for me with these DSLRs is that they just became too
heavy and clunky and big. I live in Thailand where it's very hot and humid all year round
and when you're carrying around one of these, plus additional lenses and flashes, my backpack
started to get so heavy it got me down. I remember times I was, you know, wandering around with all
this camera gear, sat down for a drink and a rest, and then I just didn't want to get up again and
carry the bag again.
And when kids came along in 2011 that was it, that was the final straw. We had
all the baby paraphernalia to carry around and it was just too much to carry all this gear. So I
moved to EOS M, the reason being the, you know, the very small form factor and light weight.
And inside here you've got the same size sensor as this one APS-C, it's actually got more pixels,
it's a better sensor. The problem with the EOS M, it was very very slow, you know, and at first it
was – some people said it was unusable – I could use it but, the the auto focus was very, very
slow. Canon brought out a firmware update which improved it quite a lot, but it was still
very, very slow. Then Canon bought out an M2, which I think was just for the Asian market,
then an M3 and they were better aesthetically, you had more buttons and dials on the outside but
the inside was still the same. It was still very, very slow. And when the M5 and M6 came along
that was a massive update, you know, it was huge. The M6 was nothing like the EOS M, it was a
really nice camera and I was happy with that for a long time.
So, I got it in 2017 and when the
Mark two came out I wasn't in any great hurry to get a Mark 2 because the M6 was still doing a
good job for me. Quite recently I decided that, you know, it probably was time to make
another upgrade so I went for the Mark 2. I wasn't expecting a huge upgrade and I've been
quite surprised so far how much better this Mark 2 is compared to the original M6. This
camera is about two and a half years old now and there have been loads of videos and I'm not
going to go through all the specs because that's already been done you know a thousand times
There's lots of information on the internet. I'll just talk to you about the sort of initial
impression that I've had since using the camera. And firstly it's a bit heavier, a bit chunkier, a
bit bigger than the original and compared to the original EOS M it's quite a bit bigger, but
it's a nice size now.
The original EOS M, although I went for this because of its small
form factor and its light weight, it's really a bit too small and a bit too slippery. And now
this is almost perfect. This grip on the front has been extended compared to the EOS M6, it's got
a nice sort of rubbery coating that's not slippery and it just feels perfect. The other thing I
like, and they made a big improvement with the M6 over the original M, in adding some additional
dials and buttons and things. With the M whatever you wanted to do you had to go through the menu
and that was just clumsy and it took a long time and it just wasn't ideal, and they improved that
with the M6 and they've done an even better job with the M6 mark two. And all these buttons are
customizable and there's a lot of customization so whatever your style of shooting you
can set the camera up just how you want, and this is going to be different for everyone,
and so it's really flexible so you can set it how you want it not how another person wants
it.
So, for example, with the autofocus, if I'm taking mainly subjects – still subjects
– and I'm using one shot AF and then suddenly something comes towards me and I want to track
it and keep it in focus I want servo AF I've just set this back button here to switch between
servo AF and one shot AF, you know, and that sort of thing is perfect.
And it's the same with
the other the other dials, the things I regularly change I set up so I can change them very, very
quickly. I just love that customization aspect. There are a lot more AF points, they're smaller
and they're more accurate, and I really love the eye AF that this one's got and the previous
models haven't. It's a well-known fact that when you're shooting portraits it doesn't matter
what's out of focus but the eyes must be in focus, you know, if they're not it just ruins
the portrait.
And that works really well and that's a great feature that I'm really
enjoying using. There's a new mode, well it's new to me anyway, called flexible priority
auto exposure and it just makes so much sense. Exposure is a triangle – aperture, shutter
speed and ISO – and in previous digital cameras it just followed the model for film
cameras. So you can just jiggle around with the aperture and shutter speed and ISO is over
here somewhere, sort of outside. What the flexible mode does, it puts all three on the same
screen so when you go into flexible mode you see ISO, aperture and shutter speed – they're
all on AUTO so you can just shoot like that or you can adjust any one depending on the type
of effect that you want. So I find that a really useful little feature. The features I've mentioned
so far are nice to haves. The thing that really blew me away was when I took this out to
take some shots of my son playing football. And the speed and responsiveness of this
thing is amazing, I just couldn't believe it, the frame rate is like 14 frames per second
and it just feels so lively in your hand. It reminded me of when I moved from a Canon
A1, an old film camera, to a Canon T90.
And this thing was a bit of a laggard and this thing
just feels so lively, you know, you can shoot off a roll of 36 exposures in no time at all and it
felt exactly the same moving from the M6 to the Mark 2. This didn't feel particularly fast, this
feels blazing fast and previously the EOS M line I've always seen as a compromise, you know, you
can, if you want great auto focus speed, great frame rate in an APS camera you needed to go and
buy a Canon 7D or something. If you wanted small size and low weight, you know, you could go for
EOS M, but you couldn't have both.
You know, I have a saying in life, "You can have anything, but
you can't have everything," well that's changed with the M6 Mark two because it's still got
the very small form factor and the light weight but it's also blazing fast. So, you know,
I see in this a camera that I can use for everything and I can use for a very long time
in the future without any need to change it. It's just, really, the first impressions of
this camera have just blown me away. The Mark 2 has got the same time lapse
feature that the original M6 had. It's also got a focus bracketing feature, which is really
nice.
I did a video of this last week, and it's got very few views, no one seems to be
interested, but for me it's a really nice feature. You know, if you're shooting macro then you
have a problem with a very narrow depth of field and one way of getting around that is to
take multiple shots at different focus points and then use some focus stacking software to put
those together to get one shot with a big depth of field. In the past I've done this using manual
focus, you know, so you'd say you take one picture and then adjust the lens slightly, take another
one, adjust the lens a bit more, take another one. It's very time consuming and if you're trying to
shoot an insect, you know, there's no guarantee the insect's gonna wait around while you mess
around with your manual focusing. And you can just set up the camera to to do this automatically,
it will take however many shots you want and it will increment the focus between
each shot, so that's really nice as well. With regard to video, a big thing for
a lot of people is it shoots in 4k, this one doesn't, and it doesn't crop.
Some other
Canon cameras have 4k but when you put them in 4k it crops the image. This one doesn't. I'm not
really into 4k, I don't really see the need for it and if I were to start shooting in 4k I would
need to make some very big hardware and software upgrades, and that'd be quite expensive as well.
So at the moment I'm just happy to shoot in 1080p. The image stabilization is also very nice.
It's got, for video, it's got like in-body five-axis stabilization and the EOS M6 had that as
well, but the M6 Mark 2 has got an enhanced mode so it stabilizes even better.
And that was
actually the reason for me buying the GoPro. I didn't want to use a gimbal, I
just wanted to carry the camera, and I saw some videos of the GoPro and I was very
impressed with the Hypersmooth and it seemed as if I could buy like a very small compact light camera
that had great image stabilization built in. That was the theory, in practice the GoPro
has given me lots of other problems, you know, it just keeps freezing up for no
reason, it has card writing problems, and it got to the point where I just couldn't
trust it anymore.
And really, when I bought the GoPro I should have just gone out and bought
an EOS M6 (Mark 2) but I didn't realize that it had this an enhanced image stabilization mode,
which is really nice and seems to work very well. With all my cameras you'll see a bit of a Canon
theme going on and you might think to yourself, well you know he's just a Canon fanboy, which is
why he's bought an M6 but that's not really the case.
I'd describe a fanboy as someone who waits
outside the Apple store all night, sleeps on the pavement, to get the latest Apple product without
knowing anything about it. I'm not like that. I'll get the equipment that does the the best job for
me and with Canon, you know, going back to 1981, the products just do the job and they
don't go wrong. And I never had any problems with my Canon film cameras. I got
the Sony point-and-shoot digital camera in 2000 and that was a troublesome camera, you
know, the rechargeable battery was troublesome, the camera went wrong, it was just a poor camera. I got the GoPro last year, that was another poor
camera, lots and lots of problems. Just recently, so I've started to get back into macro
photography, I bought a Yongnuo ring flash and I bought Yongnuo because it was about a
fifth of the price of the Canon ring flash. You know, I knew that the Canon wouldn't be any
problem but I thought I'd try and save some money. I got it out the box, went to try it and it
only only flashed some of the time, you know, you can see the light come on to show that it
recycled okay it was ready to flash, you press the shutter button and the flash didn't fire.
With
Canon that sort of thing doesn't happen, you know, you buy a Canon product, you know it's going to
work, so that's why I stick to Canon. And you may think I'm a bit of a fan boy in recommending the
EOS M6, but that's not the reason. It's just that with every Canon product I've had they've worked
really really well, totally reliable, no problems and apart from the reliability
this one's got great functionality and great speed as well so it's a camera that
I'm very, very happy to recommend even now when it's two and a half years old. If you
have any comments, questions or other feedback please leave them below and there will be
more videos soon. So, thank you for watching!.
