Canon EOS 60D Digital Camera Review

Shooting Modes

The 60D offers a good selection of shooting modes that provides plenty of flexibility for the user.

Focus

The 60D offers 9 focus points arranged in a diamond shape around the center of the frame, with one point in the center of the frame. All of these points are the cross type, but the center focus point is a dual cross type, which is more effective with both horizontal and vertical edges: Canon claims double the sensitivity for the center point over the others. 9 focus points is significantly less than many other cameras: the Sony SLT-A55 offers 15, and the Canon 7D offers 19, which provides more flexibility in choosing where in the frame to focus. Also missing is the zone system of the 7D, which allows the user to select a zone of AF points to use.

Switching between the focus points is done by pressing the set button. The user can then select an individual point with the control dial or the directional pad, or select all points so the camera will get as many into focus as possible.

There are three focusing modes on offer: One Shot, AI Focus, and AI Servo.

A full manual focus is also available by flicking the switch on the lens body. When in full manual mode, the camera helps a little by flashing the focus points that it detects as being in focus when the shutter is half pressed down.

Recording Options

The D60 offers a good range of image size and quality options, with the size options shown in the table below. All of these offer two different quality levels, described as Fine and Standard. Unusually, the 60D also offers three size settings for RAW images (which contain the raw data from the image sensor for maximum quality): the full raw image, M-RAW and S-RAW. The full RAW images contain about 18 megapixels, while RAW M and RAW S images contain 10.1 or 4.5 megapixels respectively.