Last week Canon released new firmware for the Canon EOS M50. The update covers two issues you may have when transferring images from the EOS M50 to your smartphone.
Firmware Version 1.0.1 incorporates the following fixes:
- Fixes a phenomenon in which some images captured with the Adobe RGB color space may not successfully transfer to a smartphone.
- Fixes a phenomenon in which some JPEG images, that were converted from RAW images may not successfully transfer to a smartphone.
- Fixes a phenomenon where DPAF doesn't work with 4K video recording. Now it works! Our bad.
- ALOL.
"innovative Canon" ... :p
I just wonder if its technically possible for them to enable it in a firmware update.
Maybe at 10 fps
I think the bottleneck is to read out and use the split pixels simultanously during the readout of ... 8MPix x 25 fps which results in reading 200 million pixels per second, measure their brightness value with 8...14 bit resolution, calculate the 8MPix images from the Bayer pattern, apply lens corrections etc. and encode the resulting pictures into a movie stream. Doing contrast detect AF is maybe done on one CPU core or special built in processing "circuitry" of the DIGIC 8.
The same with the 100 (120) fps mode in HD (1280 x 768) where exactly NO AF is available.
So I do not see any chance to have DPAF with 4k @ 25fps.
See also https://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/education/infobank/capturing_the_image/digic_processing.do where they state that a lot of functionality inside Canons DIGIC processors is not software but hardware which makes them fast but energy saving at the same time. DIGIC 4 (5Dii) to DIGIC 5+ (5Diii) made the processor 17x faster which cannot be done by ramping up CPU clock or the number of cores ... enabling better on the fly - lens aberration correction and/or video quality
Hand raised :)
I was going to say “Fixes a phenomenon where the 4K video is severely cropped.”
Bummer- they didn’t even try to fix it ;)
My 1DX and 5D4 can record 4K and us Dual-Pixel AF just fine. I don't know what's going on with the internal design of the camera, but it may indeed be physically impossible to "unlock" the feature in firmware...however, I really doubt it. I'm certain that the next M5 will work just fine, as well as the upcoming crop sensor DSLRs.
The M50 has the Digic8 processor which should be more powerful than the Digic6+ found in the aforementioned cameras. So who really knows why...I can speculate that it's purely a price-point handicap.
Your arguments are very good - speed of DIGIC 8 is much higher than speed of DIGIC 6+. I searched for the same information in the net after I wrote my post.
My conclusion:
If DIGIC 6 had the feature (4k WITH DPAF) I would expect in inside the DIGIC 8 and the M50 were crippled by software.
But the "+" might indicate that there is a big plus: Another core e.g. which can do the DPAF math while the main core(s) do the imaging math OR the plus is an additional chip for the DIGIC 6 chipset. The "+" processors are only in the high end cameras and the 6D mark i
You are both totally correct. It appears that these cameras have dedicated processors for specific actions. I knew the 1DX II, but I never knew the 5D4 did as well. It also explains why the 1DX feels so much snappier and better than the 5D4. The AF module is the same, but they're using different processors and amount of processors to perform those functions.
So I think the single Digic 8 may be very powerful, but it's handling the full load of the camera's functions at once. I really hope the next M5 Mark II has dual processors and a larger battery to compensate for the inevitable battery consumption.