You can get hold of a Canon EOS M50 for about £650. This is a good price for a camera of this class, but it’s by no means a small chunk of change. So why do I consider this investment to have been worth every penny?

Smartphone vs EOS M50 Camera

First and foremost, there’s the matter of control. The smartphone was just not giving me the level of control I wanted over exposure settings like aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.

The best way to achieve that professional look in photography is by setting the aperture wide and the ISO low creating a beautifully shallow depth of field, with the main subject in pin-sharp focus and the background artfully blurred.

It’s tricky to achieve this easily on a smartphone at a good resolution.

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Let’s Talk Cameras

My Canon M50 came with a 15-45mm kit lens. I can improve this effect further by upgrading to another lens like the EF-M 32mm f1.4 STM with a wider aperture, potentially giving you even more professional-looking photography.  

This is the next big advantage of a system camera like the EOS M50 – it offers a much greater growth path than a phone, with the ability to buy and swap out new lenses with longer and shorter focal lengths, depending on the situation.

These are quite general points that are common to many cameras, and it’s worth noting that the EOS M50 has many specific features that make it a worthy upgrade in my eyes.

The Dual Pixel Autofocus system is fantastic, locking onto subjects with the kind of speed and accuracy that smartphones can only dream about.

Focusing becomes something you simply don’t have to think about – although there’s also the option for manual focus if you prefer, again something that isn’t possible on a smartphone. 

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Why is this ideal for content creators?

There’s plenty more that’s excellent about the Canon EOS M50 – so much that this blog could easily be double the length!

To keep things simple, we’re going to quickly run through the 5 key features that make this camera such a great choice for content creators.

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Removable storage

If you shoot for about five minutes of 4K content, you’re going to run up about 1GB of storage that's needed. Therefore, if you’re using a 64GB iPhone, or even a larger model, you’re going to fill it up very, very quickly.

Sure, there’s the cloud, but you’re still going to run into this problem.

A much easier and more efficient solution is a removable memory card in a camera, which you can transfer to hard drives or a long-term cloud solution when you’re done shooting.

RAW

‍RAW files contain uncompressed and unprocessed image data, allowing photographers to capture practically every detail they see in their viewfinder.

The RAW file format stores the largest amount of detail out of any raster file type, which photographers can then edit, compress, and convert into other formats.

I like to bring these into Adobe Lightroom, which isn’t that complicated to use. Now you’re editing like a pro too!

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Flip-around LCD screen

‍The 3-inch, fully articulating touchscreen on the EOS M50 is perfect for vlogging, letting you frame yourself up with ease. You can do this on an iPhone of course, but it necessitates using the inferior front-facing camera. 

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Microphone jack

This is absolutely critical for elevating your video content.

Nothing reveals a video as amateur more quickly than low-quality audio, and you just don’t get enough quality from built-in mics on smartphones or cameras.

The EOS M50 lets you plug in a professional mic like the RØDE Videomic Go, and also has a hotshoe for mounting it!

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Wireless and Bluetooth

‍The connectivity aspects of the EOS M50 turn my smartphone into a fantastic tool for streamlining my shoots.

I can control the camera’s functions with my phone, stopping and starting the shot without getting up from my chair, and transferring images or video to the cloud without removing the SD card. 

Freeing up my phone from being the primary camera also lets me do other useful things with it that you might not have even considered – for instance, sticking my video script on the screen and using it as an autocue! It all just makes life that little bit easier. 

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Conclusion

For me personally, I see the difference and feel the benefits of using a ‘proper’ camera for things like talking heads, people, venue shots, food, and drink shots, and just producing a video with better overall quality audio.

So if you want to capture images like a pro and stand out from the competition on your website and across social media, get the Canon EOS M50.

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