Introduction
Over the years, I’ve written many books about Canon cameras, and every time I do, I’m excited about the camera and the new features it offers photographers. This is very much the case with the Canon EOS 70D. On the surface, the 70D may not look like a huge upgrade to its predecessor, the EOS 60D, but looks are deceiving. The 70D holds the potential to revolutionize autofocus (AF) technology with Canon’s new Dual Pixel CMOS AF system. With this technology, approximately two-thirds of the image sensor surface is capable of providing autofocus — not just the group of autofocus points clustered in the center of the viewfinder. Thus, in the Live View and Movie modes, where the new technology is used, you get quick, accurate focusing just about anywhere over two-thirds of the sensor area. That means that the smaller array of 19 AF points is no longer a restriction for still shooting provided that you use Live View mode. The new focus system is also fast and accurate.
Even when shooting still images using the viewfinder, the focus is improved over the 60D. The 70D inherits the high-performance autofocus system from the popular EOS 7D with a 19-point AF array (and again, the autofocus performance is excellent). The 70D also got a modest increase in resolution to 20.2 megapixels versus 18 megapixels in the 60D, and a big jump to 7 frames per second with continuous shooting (Large/JPEG quality). The fast DIGIC 5+ image processor delivers speedy camera performance with sterling ...
