Last night I saw a new Canon DSLR TV commercial and it was amazingly misleading. There was a woman on a beach with a small child and a dog. The child and dog were running around on the beach and in the ocean and she was using video mode to track them. It looked like she had a 550D in her outstretched arms using the rear LCD. I am not real up on the 550D video mode. Does it AF? Or, if it does is it just very slow CDAF? Either way there is no way she could get that nice video of very active subjects moving around quickly in erratic directions. Also, in typical very bright beach light an unshaded LCD would have not been a whole lot of use.

That sounds a bit sus, unless the Canon video mode stops down too f22 ISO3200 and everything is in focus ha ha.
Greg

The 550D does not AF, but in bright sunlight, it stops down to f/16 by default and bumps the ISO up, while retaining a shutter speed of 1/50th. That's in default mode. All Canon cameras are designed to use the smallest aperture possible during video when used in fully auto or programmed mode, but you can over-ride this and force wider apertures in Aperture Priority mode.

So yes, the Canon does indeed stop right down in sunny beach conditions. It just doesn't freeze movement very well, but video makers love blurry frames as the result looks smoother.

David

I hope they play the commercial again on TV, but I haven't seen it again yet. Maybe it was at f16 and dof took care of focus. I checked a dof calculator and for a 550D sensor f16 at 18mm (short end of kit lens) and focused to 3.6 feet would get you in focus from 1.79 feet to infinity:

Subject distance 3.6 ft

Depth of field
Near limit 1.79 ft
Far limit Infinity
Total Infinite

In front of subject 1.8 ft
Behind subject Infinite

Hyperfocal distance 3.56 ft
Circle of confusion 0.019 mm