Now I can talk about the ALL NEW Canon R1 and R5II cameras!!!!!

As many of you have expected, I have had a chance to shoot with the new Canon R1 and R5II cameras, but have not been able to tell you about my experiences with the cameras until now. Today Canon officially announced these new cameras and I am free to share my findings with you all.

I have spent most of my time playing with the Canon R1, since I will be using a couple of these cameras at the Olympics in little over a week and wanted to become as familiar as possible with the camera body before putting it to good use in Paris. For that reason, this blog will focus mostly on that new camera. It is not to say that the Canon R5II is not equally exciting, and I expect that I will use both new cameras in Paris this month. But my primary camera of choice for the Olympics will be the Canon R1.

There are a ton of new features to the Canon R1, but I want to focus on the features that I am most excited about. 

Let's get started!

Two CFexpress card slots

First of all, let me start with the one hardware change that I have wanted for a really long time! The camera has two CFexpress slots. I have really enjoyed using the Canon R3 camera, but even when I first used the pre-production camera at the Tokyo Olympics, I was not happy with the SD card slot. I always shoot to the same images to both cards (for redundancy reasons). Because the SD cards are so much slower than the newer CFexpress cards, it slowed down the buffer clear in the camera, and I did miss some shots because the buffer was full. I had a long talk with the Canon engineers in Tokyo about this. Now, with the Canon R1, I can't imagine I will ever have that issue again. Not only does it have two really fast card slots, it has blazing fast processing speed and a large internal buffer,  

Eye control

The Canon R3 had eye control, but honestly I tried it in Tokyo and turned it off. I was super excited about this feature when I was briefed about it, but it did not live up to my expectations. With the Canon R1, everything has changed. The Canon R1 has a much improved eye control system and it is amazing! I had a chance to use the new camera a couple of weeks ago, with some other photographers at a special meeting with Canon, and we all agreed that this new eye control was light years better than the one on the R3. I expect that I will use the new eye control at all times, regardless of what I am shooting. (One hint - I turn off the on-screen tracking icon as I find it distracting. But even without the indicator, the camera still focuses on whomever I am looking at. It is awesome!!! I really look forward to using this in Paris for the Olympics!

Pre-continuous shooting

I know that some other brands of cameras have had this feature for a little while, but since I am a Canon shooter, I have never tried anything like it. What does it do? This feature allows you to hit the shutter button of the camera (as long as you are holding it half way down) and it will go back half a second and write those images to the memory card. The first night that I had the Canon R1 in my hands, we had a big storm in Arizona. I opened the balcony door to my hotel room to try and capture images of the lightning. After a couple of failed attempts at capturing images with a long shutter time, the rain was getting too hard and I could not rest the camera on the ledge of my deck for the long exposure. Then I realized that this would be the perfect time to try the pre-capture. I stayed mostly in my room (out of the rain) and waited for a strike of lightning. I was holding the button half way down when the strike happened. As soon as I saw the flash I hit the shutter button. The camera wrote the previous half second worth of images to my memory card and voila, I had the photo!

(I can show you the image this way, but can't post the actual image since it was taken with a pre-production camera.)

I can see myself using this feature at the Olympics when photographing the fast action sports. There are times when I miss a shot because I did not anticipate what happened at the moment. It would be really great to be able to go back and get what I missed. This was the case in Arizona when I tested the camera during a basketball and soccer game. I have not used the camera enough to know how much of a battery drain this is, but I suspect that it would degrade the battery life by a fair amount. This is not a major issue, since the benefits far outweigh what might be shorter battery life.

Sticky focus

Back in January of 2021, I wrote a blog post about what I wanted in the next flagship Canon camera. And if you look at that post, you will see that Canon actually delivered on almost everything for the Canon R1. I stated back then that I wanted even better focusing. I can tell you that when I have used the pre-production R1, the focus is extremely fast and very sticky. By that, I mean that the camera will stay focused on my subject even when another person might cross in front of them. This is VERY important to me. 

Variable burst rates

Again, going back to the blog post from 2021, I wanted the ability to change the burst rate for the high-end camera, and now they gave that to us. The new Canon R1 can capture up to 40 frames per second, but I rarely need that speed. I love that I can customize the burst rates to fit my needs. I will likely set the top burst rate to 25 fps (or something like that) for most situations, but I can see cranking that up to the full 40fps for sports like Olympic diving, where I want to capture the diver right at the split second when their hands are breaking the plane of the water.

Noise reduction

While most people are asking for higher resolution in their cameras, I am asking for cleaner images with less noise (grain) at higher ISOs. During my briefing with Canon, they told me that this new camera produces a much cleaner image at high ISO. I had a chance to test that a little and found this to be true. I want to do more testing in the future.

Prioritizing people

I was expecting many of the new features of the Canon R1, but one feature that surprised me more than all the others was the people prioritization.  With this feature, you can take a photo of someone and register that person (and up to 9 others in order of priority) in the camera. Once the image(s) are registered, the camera will look for those people and lock in on them like never before. This is really interesting and could be very useful at the Olympics when I want to isolate one athlete in particular. I also found a way to quickly turn that on and off with a single button press, so that I can determine when the camera should highlight that subject and the times that I prefer not to to highlight that subject (even though that person might be in the frame).

No rolling shutter

In all the previous mirrorless cameras from Canon, there has been an issue with rolling shutter (distortion with high speed objects). The Canon R1 does not have a global shutter, but is so fast at capturing images on the new sensor, that rolling shutter should no longer be an issue. I can tell you that in all then images I have captured with the pre-production camera, I have seen no distortion. 

No blackout

I have had times when I have shooting images and had to deal with the blackout in the viewfinder in between frames. When taking photos at really fast shutter speeds, this is not an issue, but when shooting with a slow shutter, it is very distracting. The new Canon R1 now has no blackout in between frames, which should make my motion panning a lot easier.

Video and Stills at the same time

I don't shoot a lot of video with my cameras, but I know that a lot of you might. In the past, when I did shoot video clips from an event, I would refrain from taking any still photos (which is a problem because I am hired to shoot stills for my clients). The reason I would not shoot stills is that it would interrupt the video to capture the still, basically rendering the video useless in my opinion. With the Canon R1, you can now capture video and stills without interrupting each other. This is a great feature for those like my son and daughter-in-law who capture stills and video for clients.

Two stage AF-ON button

Canon has basically turned the AF-ON button into two buttons, allowing us to program one function for a half press and another function while pressing all the way down on the button. I have not really played with this much, but will give it a try soon. I am intrigued by this, but afraid that I will have a hard time half pressing this button since I have years of muscle memory cramming it down all the way for every shot.

There are still some things that I wish were improved even more on the R1. Here is that list:

Resolution

The resolution of the Canon R1 is 24.2 megapixels. Although this is adequate for most everything I photograph, I do wish that they had increased the resolution to 30MP or 35MP and then given me a choice to turn that down if I wanted.

Flash Synch Speed

In the past, we have been limited to a flash synch speed of 1/250 sec. This is fine, but I would really love to have a flash synch speed that is much faster. They have improved the flash synch speed to 1/320 sec in the R1, but I wish that had been even more of an improvement.  

Camera weight

Having used the flagship products for many years, and knowing how much wear and tear it takes on my body, I wish that new Canon R1 was lighter than previous models, but that is not the case. I know that this might be asking a little too much, but hey, I guy can ask. 

The Canon R5 II

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I decided to focus most of my attention on the Canon R1, but that is not to discount my excitement about the new Canon R5II. This new camera shares some of the high-end features of the Canon R1. Notably, the excellent focus system, pre-continuous shooting and even the eye control. During my offsite with Canon, we were told that the new Canon R5II has 95% of the focus system as the R1. That is amazing!

This camera will not achieve the burst rate of the R1, but honestly, it is not designed to be the ultimate sports camera, and the burst rate is plenty for fast action and wildlife. Combining the new focus system with the 45 megapixels makes for an awesome camera in my opinion. I see myself upgrading to this camera as soon as they are available. 

It still has a combination of CFexpress and SD slots, which makes for slower buffer clear. But I have dealt with that for many years in the existing Canon R5 and will have to stick it out at least one more revision, to see what Canon does after this. 

Conclusion

At $6299 (R1) and $4299 (R5II), these are not inexpensive cameras, but having used both of them, I see them as really solid additions to my camera bags to help me get even better images. 

I have to tell you that I am SUPER excited about both cameras and can not wait to put the Canon R1 to use in Paris. Even though we all know that the camera does not make the photographer, with these latest improvements I expect to capture even better photos than I did in the past. I guess only time will tell. 

Now as we approach the Summer Olympics, my big question is...will Adobe have the RAW support for these cameras in the next week or so?

You can all look forward to seeing my Canon R1 images from Paris in a week or so, as I plan to be shooting with at least two of these cameras, and maybe an Canon R5II as well!

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