The Canon EOS 6D – beta test footage – as good as mark III?

by Sebastian WöberNovember 28^th, 2012

Videos by Johnnie Behiri

We’ve had high hopes for the Canon EOS 6D as a full-frame HDSLR camera. Could it bring the 5D mark III’s HDSLR video strengths at a much lower price?

Looking at the beta EOS 6D we’ve had here in our office it looks just like we don’t get the same from it as we got from the 5D mark III.
Read on to find out more.

Johnnie Behiri took the new Canon EOS 6D out and shot this nice little short about a chocolate factory here in Vienna (upper video). And made an ISO test at ISO 800 and ISO 1250 (lower video).

The EOS 6D has a full-frame sensor that gives you the typical full-frame look at almost half the price of the 5D mark III. That sounds like a bargain. But for HDSLR the beta model of this camera shows that it’s not quite up to the standard we’d like to see nowadays.

It’s the aliasing and moiré patterns that have haunted HDSLR cameras since they came out. A very unpleasant side effect that we would like to see gone from our video recordings. Though soft the 5D mark III delivered a very clean image finally free of aliasing problems, but it looks like these have come back to the 6D again. At minute 1:26 in the chocolate video this becomes very clear. The overall image looks like there is less color depth than in 5D mark III material.

Another video feature we miss is that there is no headphone jack on the EOS 6D, and no audio coming from HDMI on this beta model, meaning that monitoring your video could prove to be impossible.

Even though these very important video features are missing the 6D still shoots very nice full-frame stills, seems to have good ISO performance and comes at a good price-point for this kind of DSLR. Let’s see some user reviews once the camera is out in December.

Here’s Johnnie Behiri’s assessment:

Canon 6D is the latest in Canon’s full frame HDSLR family and honestly, there is simply no substitute for the full frame sensor “look”.

The footage was taken with a pre production model camera and hopefully the video quality in the final version will be improved.

Camera strengths:
-Full frame sensor
-Clean high ISO in video mode (1250 is very mush usable).
-Manual audio adjusting
-PAL/NTSC

Camera weakness:
-Severe moire
-Soft image
-No headphone socket
-No audio through HDMI while recording (for monitoring audio on new EVF’s)
-No clean HDMI output

Notes:
-Format: 1080/25 All-I
-Video shot with available light. Litepanels 1×1 was used for the interview only
-Audio was recorded directly to the camera. No external audio recorder was used.
-ISO settings 640-1250
-Picture profile: Netural 0,-4,-1, 0
-30% sharpening was added in post (Adobe Premiere CS6)
-No CC was applied

Equipment used in this video:
Sachtler ACE L tripod
Vocas base plate
Lenses: Samyang 35mm, Canon 70-200 f4, Tokina 11-16mm
Various Kata bags
Litepanels 1×1
TvLogic VFM-056W

Johnnie Behiri is a BBC freelance cameraman/editor operating from Vienna Austria.
When not BBCing, Johnnie is filming documentaries, commercials, music videos and testimonials/image videos (johnniebehiri.com)

Pre-order Canon EOS 6D for $2100 here:

Pre-order Canon EOS 6D with 24-105mm kit lens for $2899 here: