Canon R5ii & R1 : Orders being taken.

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David Berry

David Berry

🇦🇺 Australia 🦘
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Canon R5ii
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Guts Swanepoel (Pangolin):
  • "I think they [Canon] may have started to listen to us finally about what we, as photographers, need."
  • "My favourite feature is the pre-capture which is in both cameras. Sadly, the R3 and the older R5 will never have it; it remains a hardware issue, not just a software update."


Jan Wegener (Early Bird Show):
  • "Let's look at the R1 first — Canon's new flagship sports camera."
And there's the rub? The R1 is designed for photojournalists; the R5ii is the better choice for enthusiast-level wildlife photographers?
 
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Pre-ordered an R5 Mk2, not sure I won't cancel though--but may as well stick around to be able to have it in-hand and test it when it is delivered. I've been generally pleased with R5 complementing my Z9 and Z8, but R5 has a lot of annoying issues too so perhaps I thought R5 Mk2 would be a marked improvement (no pun intended :)).
 
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Awesome! Some R5 issues I can mention to check for (if possible): BIF tracking "stalling" so that I cannot track the bird reliably, sometimes (also BIF) with the 100-500 lens to be precise, I have a blurred bird in the sky and tap focus (either of the three modes I have configured) and absolutely no joy, it just refuses to focus. Focusing through obstacles, actually Nikon Z8/9 finds the eye now with the latest firmware but R5 struggles. Once R5 found the subject though, I get a better result than with the Nikons. However, it requires some post-processing to get right. Love the Canon colours though, something easily natural about them.
 
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Foxy…

I suspect that the R5ii will draw roughly level with the Z8's wildlife photo performance (no idea on video performance).

Guts Swanepoel (Pangolin) on the R5ii:
  • Suddenly the high megapixel camera (R5ii) has most of the advantages of the R3.
… David

Foxy, maybe I'll start an R5 + RF 100-500 BIF thread for us to explore the issues you raised in post #5. (Don't want to divert this thread.)​
 
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They both look amazing, especially if you're in the Canon universe and are happy with the RF selection. Probably won't cause Sony and Nikon users to switch.
 
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Coming solely from a still perspective (I didn't even read the video specs and wouldn't understand them fully if I did) I'd say both the R1 and R5II are very boring releases. I can't believe these are 4 and 5 year flagship and near flagship replacements in 2024.

I'll speak more towards the R5II as the R1 seems to have nothing special above the R5II for a bird photographer (other than the 40FPS and OLED 9mp EVF).

If one is devoted to the Canon ecosystem for whatever reason then I feel the R5II would be a camera to upgrade to from the R5 just because of the stacked sensor alone. Add to that an extra 10FPS and being able to select 5, 10, 15, 20 instead of being force fed 20FPS only on the R5 in ES.

Other than that though the R5II is just catching up. The ES scan speed matches the 2017 A9 at 1/160 (6.3s)...well short of the A1 1/260 and Z8/Z9 1/270. That should be fine for most bird photography but we can surely understand why they kept the MS. There is pre-capture but it is JPEG only so nothing groundbreaking there....I haven't read yet if it still uses the clunky container file that has to be extracted with Canon crap software or actually can just save the files normally like A9III and Nikon cameras??

I don't know what else there is to really talk about the R5?? It likely has a nicer EVF than the A1 and Z8/Z9 as even the outgoing R5 has a nicer EVF than those two cameras....at least for just the image it produces....but I'm fairly certain even though it has the stacked sensor it will still have a more jarring transition from actively firing a burst to letting off the shutter and back to a real time feed. This is based with my time with the R3's stacked sensor which still had this jarring transition...something the A1 and A9III keep to a bare minimum and the Z8/Z9 have basically eliminated with the dual-feed feature.

Has the bird AF been improved? Who knows? All the articles I've read talk about new sports AF features but nothing about bird/animal stuff. R5 BEAF is still better than A1 and Z8/Z9 IMHO for static birds but not as good as the others for BIF. Maybe they've improved it....we shall have to wait and see. My friend will be buying an R5II I think (unless she uses this as an excuse to move to Nikon or Sony) so I will hope to try the R5II sometime this fall.
 
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Cameron T said:
Honestly, as far as it goes, I'm not super impressed with either. Good for Canon users, but I feel no desire to jump ship.
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Yeah, for stills photography I can’t see any reason anyone would switch to Canon because of these two cameras. They may be good enough to hold onto their current customers but I’m sure they are going to lose some bird photographers to Nikon/Sony after this ho hum release after 4-5 years of waiting and nothing exciting in the lens department for birds.
 
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David Berry said:
Foxy…

I suspect that the R5ii will draw roughly level with the Z8's wildlife photo performance (no idea on video performance).

Guts Swanepoel (Pangolin) on the R5ii:
  • Suddenly the high megapixel camera (R5ii) has most of the advantages of the R3.
… David

Foxy, maybe I'll start an R5 + RF 100-500 BIF thread for us to explore the issues you raised in post #5. (Don't want to divert this thread.)​
Click to expand...
Thanks David, I think a non-partisan thread on R5/II with Nikon parallels would be of value.
 
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arbitrage said:
Yeah, for stills photography I can’t see any reason anyone would switch to Canon because of these two cameras. They may be good enough to hold onto their current customers but I’m sure they are going to lose some bird photographers to Nikon/Sony after this ho hum release after 4-5 years of waiting and nothing exciting in the lens department for birds.
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Even for video, nikon has had 8k for a while now, and Canon is just catching up (I'm not sure if Sony has 8k, but I'm not a video guy either).

The lenses are definitely a larger issue, and imo where nikon has the biggest advantage. Body wise it's hard to go wrong anywhere, and everyone leaps ahead with a new release in some way.
 
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When was the last time, since all three big OEMs went mirrorless, a camera body was a valid reason to switch? Heck, even between the F4 and EOS 1 there was no reason. I wouldn't measure the sucess of a camera body by that metric, let alone its quality and sophistication.
 
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I feel like there are times for more niche cameras (something like the a7c series, or the retro style cameras like fuji/zf/zfc) when people use it to switch. In the more mainline bodies, I'm not sure. The d500 would have been one of those points for a crop body dslr I believe, but probably still didn't convert a ton of people.
 
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