My friend lent me her brand new, in box, R5II for the evening and Friday morning. She wanted me to get it setup to match her R5 which used to be my R5 so many years ago.
So last evening I spent an hour trying to shoot birds in the backyard. Cloudy conditions, ISO was high as her lens is the 100-500 so f/7.1. I shot hummingbirds amongst my flower garden and finches coming and going from my feeders. Not the best conditions to really test the camera but I hope to have some better subjects this morning (fingers crossed for barn swallows to give it the ultimate test).
It has been a couple years since I've had a Canon in my hand. I sold my R5 back in 2021 when I got the A1. I had an R3 on demo from CPS in Apr 2022.
First thing first, BEAF is top notch. It seems improved from the R5. It can find perched birds very small in the frame. I think overall a bit better than the A1 when the bird is somewhat camouflaged. It was finding the eye of the hovering hummingbird even in the dim conditions. Right on par with the A1 for that. Hummingbirds are one of the standouts for the A1's BEAF system so I was impressed the R5II could hang with it.
I tried the pre-capture (actually had it enabled the entire time) and it worked as expected. Light levels were a bit low to really get a fast enough SS without 25600 ISO to really get a sharp shot of a launching finch but the precapture did its part, ruined shots are motion blur as I only went to 1/2000s and I'd normally want 1/4000 or faster for launching songbirds.
There is still an ongoing debate of what the camera is doing in precapture. Some are thinking that regardless what you set the FPS at the precapture portion is always running at 30FPS, saving 0.5s=15 shots (then dropping to your selected FPS for the post-capture shots). Others say the camera always buffers 15 shots but runs at your selected FPS and therefore goes further into the past the slower your FPS. Others say it runs at 0.5s and therefore would save less shots the lower the FPS. I couldn't quite figure it out last night but will try again this morning. Not that it would matter much to me as I'd leave it at 30FPS and get the 0.5s=15shots.
If you are a back button AF (BBAF) shooter than it is very easy to just leave pre-capture on all the time. This is because the pre-capture isn't activated by an AF-ON button no matter what. Only half-press of the shutter triggers it to buffer the shots. Therefore as a BBAF shooter if you don't want pre-capture you just do your BBAF and push the shutter fully when you want to shoot...no frames will have time to buffer. If you want pre-capture you use your BBAF to focus and half-press the shutter at the same time to buffer the shots. So simple, and you don't have to menu dive to turn it on/off. If you are a shutter button AF shooter than it is more difficult to not trigger it all the time (and therefore get a lot of extra shots to cull at the end of the day). I'm a shutter AF guy. What I did is setup my shutter AF as Spot AF, AF-ON button to be Eye-AF and * button to be Zone AF with AF activation. Therefore anytime I was using the Eye-AF or Zone AF I was basically a BBAF shooter and it wouldn't do precapture if I didn't touch the shutter. When I needed the Spot AF to get initial targeting before handing off to Eye-AF I'd just release the shutter when switching to Eye-AF (on AF-ON button) and it would clear the pre-capture buffer it had saved. That worked, not my ideal but I also tried going to full BBAF and I just couldn't get on with it even though I was a dedicated BBAF shooter for all my DSLR days.
A few other shots on the camera...I find the controls to be inferior to the Sony cameras. Excepting the AF-ON button the other back buttons are too small, have no texture and are too close together. The camera without a grip just doesn't fit well in my hand. But I'm sure if I had the grip it would be much better as I always run my Sony cameras with grip and had a grip on my R5 back in the day. It was hard to get used to the position of the front scroll wheel even though I used to shoot Canon for years with the wheel in this top position. I guess I'd get used to it if I was using the R5II as my daily driver.
EVF was nice, no more of the R5 stuttering slideshow in ES because of the stacked sensor in the R5II. A1 is a more expansive view but overall they are pretty equal when shooting. Way better WYSIWYG and easier to judge exposure than the Z9/Z8. Still can't compare to Sony with its live zebras in stills. Nothing beats Sony for nailing exposure.
I'll add more thoughts after I shoot it this morning. Unfortunately, it is going to be cloudy with chance of showers so I won't be able to fully realize the camera's capabilities in good light. Not helped by being handcuffed by an f/7.1 lens. I'm used to shooting f/2.8 through f/5.6.
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