Canon first revealed its plan to take the lead in the prosumer mirrorless camera market back in February. Fragments of information were set free in the months following, and now the company has completely pulled back the curtain to reveal its new full-frame mirrorless flagship, the EOS R5, along with a consumer-focused R6 model.
First up, the highly anticipated EOS R5. Inside its weather-sealed chassis you'll find a newly-developed 45-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor, which is married to the Digic X image processing engine from the 1D X MkIII. This pairing offers a light sensitivity range of ISO100-51,200, which can be extended to 102,400, and up to 20 frames per second continuous shooting when using the silent shutter, or 12 fps with the mechanical shutter.
The flagship mirrorless camera comes with the latest flavor of Canon's fast and accurate Dual Pixel autofocus for 100 percent coverage of the AF area, and 1,053 automatically-selected AF zones have been made available. As well as face, head and eye-tracking for humans, special enhancements have been made to add tracking AF for dogs, cats and birds, not only their faces but also their bodies.
There's 5-axis in-body optical image stabilization too, which enables up to eight stops of combined lens and body shake reduction when used with IS-equipped RF glass.
Elsewhere, the R5 sports a 0.5-inch, 5.76-million-dot OLED electronic viewfinder with a refresh rate of 119.88 fps, a 3.2-inch, 2.1-million-dot vari-angle LCD touch monitor, integrated dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for wireless image transfer from the camera to Canon's new cloud platform, and dual media card slots, though Canon has opted not to have both as SD – one is CFExpress and the other is UHS-II SD.
While its photo chops look impressive, Canon has really gone to town in the video department. As we noted in April, the R5 seems to be the company's first serious effort on the video front since it essentially opened up cinema-friendly video recording to non-broadcast professionals with the launch of the EOS 5D MkII DSLR in 2008.
Most notably, the R5 offers in-camera recording of non-cropped 8K RAW video at 29.97 fps in 10-bit 4:2:2 Log or HDR using H.265 compression. If you reduce the quality to 4K, 119.88 fps recording is available for high resolution slo-mo. Dual Pixel AF is available for all video modes, all resolutions, and all frame rates. External recording via HDMI is available, but limited to 4K resolution at 59.94 fps.
A second mirrorless camera was announced today in the shape of the EOS R6, a less capable and cheaper version of the R5 that comes with a 20.1-MP full-frame CMOS sensor, the same Digic X processing engine as the R5 but with ISO100-102,400 light sensitivity that can be expanded to 204,800. Continuous shooting speeds stay the same.
The electronic viewfinder on this camera has a lower resolution of 3.69-million dots, the LCD touchscreen around back is 3 diagonal inches at 1.62-million dot resolution, and video recording tops out at 4K at up to 59.94 fps. Sensibly for the consumer market, the two media card slots here both take UHS-II SD cards.
Canon is also making four RF lenses available to go with the new cameras – the RF100-500mm F4.5-7.1 L IS USM, RF600mm F11 IS STM, RF800mm F11 IS STM, and RF85mm F2 MACRO IS STM. Two lens extenders have been announced too.
The EOS R5 flagship is due for release at the end of this month for a body-only price of US$3,899, or $4,999 with an RF 24-105mm F4 L IS USM lens. The R6 follows in August for $2,499 body only, or $2,899 with an RF 24-105 F4-7.1 IS STM kit lens and $3,599 with an RF 24-105mm F4 L IS USM lens. Over to you Sony, Panasonic and Nikon.
Source: Canon
