Big test Canon EOS R5 Mark II PRICE: £4499 CANON.CO.UK
Much anticipated and with enormous footprints to follow, does the EOS R5 Mark II live up to all the hype or is it an overpriced letdown? Will Cheung has some of the answers
my London shoot, I racked up 1400 frames, which included several long bursts using the electronic and mechanical shutters, plus several short movies – and I still had 30% capacity at the end. That was good, especially as I spent some time digging into the menus. There is one major physical change in the EOS R5 Mark II and that is the provision of a stills/movie switch which sits exactly where the on/off switch is on the EOS R5. The EOS R5 Mark II’s on/off has moved to the right with a lock position in-between the on and off positions. It means you can carry the camera in one hand and turn it on while bringing it up to the eye. Start-up, though, like on the EOS R5, is not fast. The downside for EOS R5 owners is that muscle memory will have them using the stills/movie switch by mistake. I would have thought a better solution would be to lose the lock option and have that function assigned from the menu and have a three-way on/off switch with positions for off, video and stills. Other key physical features include a multi-function hotshoe, which is protected by a fiddly-to-use cover, and a full-size HDMI port, which will please video shooters. Of course, while the exterior changes are important, it is what Canon has done inside the EOS R5 Mark II that is important. While the new camera has the same 45-megapixel effective resolution, it uses a backlit stacked sensor for a much faster all-round performance. Top shooting rate of the electronic shutter tops out at 30fps, with options of other shooting rates, and this is with 14-bit Raw capture – whereas the EOS R5 had the option of 20fps only and at 12-bit. The speed range of the electronic shutter is 30secs to 1/32,000sec with flash sync at 1/160sec or slower; the older model was limited to 0.5sec to 1/8000sec with no flash sync. The electronic shutter also has an adjustable volume click. In fact, you can have sound to confirm
WORDS & IMAGES BY WILL CHEUNG
CANON’S EOS 5 series cameras are incredibly important to its business because it sells lots of them, and they are popular with end users because you get professional-level, cutting- edge performance in a standard-size body at a price that is affordable. I use the word ‘affordable’ advisedly because the EOS R5 Mark II body sells at £4499, which is still serious money; its predecessor was £4199 at launch in 2020, so we are not talking pocket money here. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the review, two points for transparency. Canon supplied us a pre-production sample of the EOS R5 Mark II (v1.0.1 firmware), so we could not fully test the camera’s imaging ability and, of course, cameras on sale in the shops might perform or handle differently. Also, we had the camera for just three days and shot around 5000 frames, mostly in London. There is a broad range of changes in the stills and video capabilities of the EOS R5 Mark II compared with the original. Physically, the two are similar in size and weight, with the new camera being just 8g heavier. The upside of this for current EOS R5 owners is that the same L-brackets will fit and the Battery Grip BG-R10 can be fitted too. But use the grip or the camera itself with the LP-E6NH battery and you will get a message telling you that some of the EOS R5 Mark II’s skills won’t be available. This includes a range of movie features and pre-capture. You need the LP-E6P battery, which sells for £119, to fully enjoy the new model – and this cell also gives greater shooting capacity. On
INTO THE LIGHT With a pre-production EOS R5 Mark II sample, we could not properly test the camera’s ability to handle dynamic range, but it looks promising. This was a Raw shot edited to taste in Adobe Lightroom. The exposure was 1/250sec at f/4 and ISO 100 using an RF 24-105mm f/4 zoom
24 Photography News | Issue 118
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